[bug#27521] [PATCH v5] build: Add iso9660 system image generator.

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

On Sun, 02 Jul 2017 22:09:28 +0200
ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:

> Heya,
> 
> Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org> skribis:
> 
> >> Let’s add #:key (volume-id "GuixSD") and then:
> >> 
> >>   "--" "-volid" (string-upcase volume-id)  
> >
> > It will fail when booting from CD because GuixSD can't find the root fs.  
> 
> I don’t understand.  What I suggest here is equivalent to what was in
> the patch (“-volid GUIXSD”), except that it avoids hard-coding the
> value; it’s purely cosmetic.

Yeah, sorry.  Ok :)

>You mean we could always use ‘grub-mkrescue’ instead of using it in one case and using ‘grub-install’ & co. in the other case, right?

Yeah that.  The only problem is it doesn't work yet for real in the USB stick case.  I tried it now :)

grub-mkrescue documents the fact that it should work from USB quite clearly - so it probably does (probably after I found all the uuid / label conversion problem locations).

Note that ISO9660 is read-only so the ISO9660 image is not a good replacement for an actual installed system.

>  guix system image -f FORMAT

Sounds good.  I think with three formats my threshold for having an option "-f" is reached :)

>Perhaps it’s simpler to just add “guix system iso-image” in this patch
series and to think about the other option separately.

Okay.  If we want to keep the stuff where it is I can commit it now.  I've tested the ISO9660 image with "qemu -cdrom", works fine.

Or if we want we can also move both system-disk-image and iso9660-image into a new module - something like (gnu system image) ?

Moving only one of them, on the other hand, wouldn't decrease the potential confusion - especially once there is a common "guix system image" :)