TODO

Ideas for a future version of febootstrap.


The name
--------

The name 'febootstrap' confuses everyone.  I'd like to rename the
program to 'supermin' and rename 'febootstrap-supermin-helper' to
'supermin-reconstruct'.


hostfiles
---------

'hostfiles' causes lots of trouble, because it bakes path dependencies
into the supermin appliance.

We propose to replace this with a list of root packages.  Lines in
hostfiles beginning with a "+" sign are a root package, eg:

  +bash
  +coreutils

We then query RPM or dpkg to get a list of hostfiles at appliance boot
time.  eg. For rpm we'd do the rpmlib equivalents of:

  rpm -ql bash    # list of files in bash
  rpm -qR bash    # what bash requires
  rpm -q --whatprovides <depN>    # recursively look up each requires

(If this is too slow, aggressively cache the results)

Some files still need to be stored at build time, basically %config
files.

Unclear what to do about kernels if we make this change.

'hostfiles' may still be needed for a handful of files that we really
want to copy in.  Notable ones: /etc/localtime and /etc/resolv.conf.


Store %post scripts
-------------------

Can we get the %post scripts and store them in a directory in the
appliance?


Directories
-----------

Reconstruction is tied to having directories being created before they
are used.  We should try to remove this limitation as it's really
quite unnecessary.


Use libsolv or hawkey for dependency resolution
-----------------------------------------------

Using Python + yum to resolve RPM dependencies is sucky and slow.  We
should look at the combination of DNF, libsolv and hawkey to replace
them:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF
https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv
https://github.com/akozumpl/hawkey