Declarative profiles

The build.sh scripts are a mess, let's get rid of them.

The vague idea I have would look something like this:

1. mkarchiso script would build the iso based on declarative configuration:

   • It would have an option that specifies a profile name to look-up in /usr/share/archiso/configs/ and an option that specifies the full path to a profile's directory.
   • It would have an option for the iso output directory/filename.

2. Each profile would have:

   • profiledef: a (script?) file that lists iso_name/iso_label/iso_publisher/iso_application/iso_version/etc.
   • airootfs: a directory that would contain all custom files.
   • packages.x86_64: a file that lists packages to be installed to workdir and thus into the iso.
   • airootfsfiles: a file that lists all custom (i.e. not from packages.x86_64) files and folders, and their permissions, that would get placed in the resulting iso.
   • An airootfssymlinks file that would list symlinks and their targets.

changed the description

I think we're on the same page here! :)

I have been brainstorming about this topic with a few people (I guess including you) and one thing that could potentially be a nice thing to have on top of your suggestions would be a templating engine, that can be used to more dynamically define configuration files, etc.

Apart from that, yes it would make a lot of sense to have a declarative config (e.g. YAML or TOML) that can map all the data that is present in the build.sh scripts and will allow us to copy and adjust files in the final image more specifically . I would even go further and modularize this to the point where we can build images e.g. only for BIOS or only for UEFI (or both) systems.

I guess the work currently done to eliminate more and more of the scripts is a good start to get what is happening under control.

marked this issue as related to #37 (closed)

marked this issue as related to #38 (closed)

airootfssymlinks could be implemented using squashfs pseudo files. That would permanently tie mkarchiso to squashfs-tools, but there are not a lot of viable alternatives (EROFS only supports lz4 compression).

marked this issue as related to #61 (closed)

mentioned in issue #71

added scopeenhancement label

closed