Call upon The Great Spirit of 'Ubuntu'...

Colin Watson cjwatson at ubuntu.com
Tue Aug 26 14:58:17 UTC 2008


On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 09:13:24PM -0700, J. Grau wrote:
> I posted this THREAD<http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5598506#post5598506>recently
> at the Ubuntu forums because there is a guy out
> THERE <http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/> who is trying to get a, in
> my opinion, very useful script running for Ubuntu-8.04-amd64.
> In a conversation with him, why remastersys is causing problems on my
> 8.04-amd64 installation, I learned that the Ubuntu Devel-team  is not very
> supportive.
> He wrote:
> 
> I asked them for info on casper and ubiquity and never even got a response
> back from them so remastersys is a complete solo effort on my part and
> anything I learned about casper and ubiquity was from reading an examining
> all of the scripts involved.

If I had a real name as opposed to a forums ID, I might be able to look
back in my archives for this ...

Of course, asking for general information is a tough one to respond to.
What level is the requestor looking for? We get such a variety of
requests that it's pretty difficult to deal with general requests for
information. Usually it works much better if you're very specific about
your requests.

(Alternatively it's possible that we just missed his request. If so,
sorry. Where did he send it to? "Fragadelic", whoever you are, please
feel free to post here or on ubuntu-installer at lists.ubuntu.com, or to
show up on #ubuntu-installer on Freenode. We - the installer developers
- don't pay much attention to forums.)

> Each new version they add something and it looks like the amd64 version has
> even more changes.

We use the same source code for both casper and ubiquity for amd64 and
i386, and I don't expect this to change. It would be a nightmare for us
as well as everyone else. I'm surprised that Fragadelic isn't aware of
this, since it's a pretty integral part of how we develop Ubuntu and
it's clear if you look at the source code to the components in question.

Out of necessity, some parts of the distribution are of course different
on the two architectures, but they aren't generally particularly visible
at this sort of level. I don't think this is in fact the problem. The
error (from your forums post) seems to be:

  File /home/remastersys/remastersys/ISOTMP/casper/filesystem.squashfs
  is larger than 4GiB-1.
  -allow-limited-size was not specified. There is no way do represent
  this file size. Aborting.

Without teaching myself from scratch how remastersys works, I have no
idea what this might be about. The squashfs we ship is certainly nowhere
near that big. Can anyone supply a source code reference to the code in
remastersys that creates the squashfs?

> They have not been consistent in terms of the behind the
> scenes stuff for the liveCD boot since I started making remastersys.  I have
> had to change it slightly for every version that they come out with and if I
> now have to change it specifically for amd64 compared to i386 I'm not going
> to be happy - lol.

If Fragadelic would like to be specific about this, we'd be happy to
discuss it. I'm afraid there is no sensible way for us to respond to
something so general. Obviously we do have to make our own changes and
improvements rather than keeping everything entirely static, and
sometimes that does involve significant changes. Sometimes there are
internal interfaces that he may not realise he shouldn't be using;
sometimes it genuinely just is a change everyone has to keep up with.

> On behalf of the people of the Ubuntu-amd64 community who are interested in
> using the remastersys script, I ask politely, if the developer(s) in
> question, could give him a possibility to ask questions or address/discuss
> the issue.

It would be best if he could do so in person rather than through a
proxy.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]




More information about the Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list