From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Mathieu Othacehe <m.othacehe@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Use genimage for disk-image creation.
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:13:30 +0200
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To: Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?= <ludo@gnu.org>
Cc: guix-devel <guix-devel@gnu.org>


Hey!

> I=E2=80=99m completely sold to the idea.  :-)

I'm glad you like it!

> Looking at =E2=80=98image-ext2.c=E2=80=99 reveals that genimage actually =
just shells out
> to mke2fs.  Indeed, I discovered that =E2=80=98mke2fs -d /my/root=E2=80=
=99 copies
> /my/root as the image=E2=80=99s root directory.  Likewise, for ISO, it ju=
st
> shells out to =E2=80=98genisoimage=E2=80=99.
>
> So I think that we could avoid =E2=80=98genimage=E2=80=99 altogether and =
implement
> similar functionality for ext4/ISO in (gnu build disk-image).

Ok! One useful functionality of genimage seems to be that's its capable
of creating complex partitioning layouts. Of course we can re-implement
it in (gnu build disk-image), but I don't know how complex will it be.

Danny, I found the genimage files for each arm/aarch64 boards inside
Buildroot repository. They are a valuable source of information, but
regardless of the decision we take for (gnu build disk-image), we can
find a way to import them and store them as Guile records.=20

I guess I'll start a small implementation to have a clearer view of this
topic.

Thank you all for the feedback,

Mathieu