Re: pg_live situation update

[Robert Bernier <robert(dot)bernier5(at)sympatico(dot)ca>]

On Wednesday 27 February 2008 09:12, Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum wrote:
> 
> Hello Robert, hello all,
> 
> On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 20:16:49 -0500 Robert Bernier wrote:
> 
> > One other matter; I've adjusted the install script so that this new 
version of 
> > pg_live will install all the pg enhancements in a clean manner on a 
machine 
> > using the Ubuntu installation scripts.
> 
> We had some live CD's at FOSDEM as a give-away, thank you for your
> effort to make this possible.
> 
>  we need a lot more improvements... 
>  Some examples, maybe one or two 
> web-based applications come into my mind...
> ... Is it possible to create a pgfoundry project for
> the live-CD's to that everyone can create his own iso image? I assume
> you have some scripts which do all the nasty work, download packages
> and create the iso image, or?

There is a copy of scripts that I use located in the main directory of the 
ISO "HOWTO.custom-livecd". It includes documentation describing the creation 
of the ISO's development environment. Please note that my machine's OS is 
similar to the distribution of pg_live so as to better debug and avoid 
incompatibility issues. Another reason for a parrallel OS is to avoid 
installing the compiler and development libraries on pg_live. Otherwise, I 
would end up adding a significant amount of unecesary development libraries 
to pg_live.

The idea of further evolving the scripts where it would prepare the 
development environment using a 'clean' version of Xbuntu is appealing. 
There's a lot a questions that you would have to first answer. For instance, 
what packages would you want removed to keep it within a reasonable size? 
What documentation would you include? Then there's bugs; for example, I am 
forced to use apache 1.3 and php 4 because phppgadmin doesn't work right with 
apache 2.0 in the live CD environment (although this is not to say you 
couldn't use apache 2.0 after installing it on the machine).

Developing clean room install scripts is possible, but there's a lot of work 
involved. It took me a couple of hundred hours to create the latest 
distribution from scratch, mostly because of all the debugging each decision 
I took entailed. Now that it's complete, creating versions of pg_live with 
new documentation,locales, applications or even a new version of postgres 
itself can now be regenerated with little effort.

cheers

robert