[Helidelinux-devel] Re: Helide linux

[Bennett T. <be...@ra...>]

2004-03-08T12:07:24 Hui Zhou:
> Very intersting. So for your final distribution, is it just a
> collection of binary bpm packages?

Yup. Some day I may whomp up an installer, but really any rescue
disk should work fine for that.

A minimal load is a linux (kernel), lilo, and busybox. For compact
server installs, you can exclude /var/lib/bpm (which installs the
spec file and full sources), /usr/include (only needed for compiling
stuff, obviously), and the docs /usr/share/{man,info,doc}. And after
running lilo, you can remove it if you want. So a running bent linux
might have nothing but a kernel and a busybox.

Then you can pick and choose what other bits you want.

> [...] and both the source file and spec file are just
> used as tools to produce bpm packages?

Here's a reasonable sample spec file:

	pkg nmap-3.50
=09
	url http://download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/nmap-3.50.tar.bz2
=09
	build \
	    tar xjf nmap-3.50.tar.bz2
	    cd nmap-3.50
	    LDFLAGS=3D'-static -s' CFLAGS=3D-Os ./configure --prefix=3D/usr --mand=
ir=3D/usr/share/man --without-nmapfe --without-openssl
	    make
	    make prefix=3D$BPM_ROOT/usr mandir=3D$BPM_ROOT/usr/share/man install

If you saved that into any file, the name doesn't matter, and ran

	bpmbuild filename

then bpmbuild would use wget to download the sources, then it'd
unpack them, build them, and prepare the binary package. The binary
package would have all the files that were populated by that "make
install", plus these three:

	/var/lib/bpm/nmap-3.50/spec
	/var/lib/bpm/nmap-3.50/src/nmap-3.50.tar.bz2
	/var/lib/bpm/nmap-3.50/sha1

The spec file is a copy of the file you fed to bpmbuild, and the
src/nmap-3.50.tar.bz2 is a copy of what wget pulled down. The sha1
is the output of find ... -type f|xargs openssl sha1, a manifest
with crypto checksums.

If bpmbuild is provided a dir as its arg, it expects to find it in
the above layout, and if all the needed sources are present in src/
it'll skip the wget step. So after installing the resulting binary
package, you can rebuild it with

	bpmbuild /var/tmp/bpm/nmap-3.50

> From the file name, seems the package is a compressed cpio
> archive, [...]

Yup. My current installer is

	bzip2 -d <pkg.cpio.bz2|(cd / && cpio -idm)

> what's the major difference from rpm?

There's little in common.

bpm's spec files are vastly simpler.

bpm binary packages are true cpio.bz2s --- no special tools required
to install them.

The bpm database in /var/lib/bpm/ is simple text files, not the
opaque binary databases built with the non-free, proprietary
Berkeley DB, that rpm puts into /var/lib/rpm/.

At the moment, bpm is implemented with a simple bash script that
calls gpath. Once I get around to focusing more on it, bpm will be
re-written in perl, and use custom code for reading and writing
cpios; the custom writer will provide programmatic control of the
owner of the files in the archive, allowing me to skip a
currently-required bpmpkgfix step (that must be run as root) that
ends up unpacking and repacking the archive. The dedicated reader
will allow very efficient, single-pass pre-extraction and analysis
of the spec and sha1 files, as well as to-be-implemented dependency
data, which in turn will allow the installer to offer helpful
warnings.

> When you feel comfortable, I would like to be a tester for your
> ``bent'' system.:)

You're welcome to look it over whenever you like.
<URL:http://bent.latency.net/bent/> has my current work.

If you want to experiment in a chrooted jail, it's ready to go.

If you have a scratch system (or a system with a scratch partition)
and a rescue disk of some sort you can use to do the initial
partitioning/newfsing/bzip2|cpio-installing, you can make a
bootstrapping system with as little as busybox+linux, or as much
more as you wish.

-Bennett