mkimage multi-distro profiles
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is the ALT Linux based distribution profile collection
which is used with mkimage to build installable and/or live
media images.

For the impatient: make sure you have hasher(1) working
and dive into make-distro script to bake an image.

Intro
~~~~~

While it's a bit complicated (sometimes even convoluted),
it's also being constantly refactored as the things become
more apparent: we would copypaste at times but then come
around with an idea of what exactly needs to be generalized
in practice.  Linux distributions is an evolving scene,
you know, so it proved to be inefficient to try and design
all things beforehand for mere us.

Here's the general structure (in relevance order):

./ -- toplevel Makefile, auxiliary makefiles, docs
  profiles/ -- subprofile directories, stage1 Makefile
  tests/ -- automated installation tests
  bin/ -- helper scripts

profiles/ is the largest part of the tree and contains:
  pkg/ -- package collection related metadata
  scripts.d/ -- stage1 hooks
  isofiles/ -- contents are added to image root
  isolinux/ -- media loader configuration[1]
  install2/ -- second stage (alterator off livecd)
  rescue/ -- rescue mini livecd
  live/ -- livecd-generating Makefile and hooks
  main/ -- generation of image's RPMS.main/
  contrib/ -- RPMS.contrib/ in the image
  addon/ -- RPMS.addon/ for a separate image
  ltsp/ -- RPMS.ltsp/ (holds some main-conflicting packages[3])
  out/ -- image file will land here (if not configured)
  kernel-pae/, lite-edu/ -- legacy?

profiles/pkg/ contains metadata for distro's packages:
  lists/ -- package list files[4]
  groups/ -- descriptions for stage3-installable lists[5]
  licenses/ -- additional license texts for non-free lists
  tags/ -- directories named by tag with links to tagged lists[6]

bin/ holds generic helper scripts (not hooks):
  check-pkg-list -- checks given pkglist(s) against apt-cache pkgnames
  existor -- (stdin)filelist * suffixes, output only existing files
  generate-modversion -- convenient kernel version parts
  pkgdups.sh -- helps weed duplicate packages from package lists
  lists2tags -- extracts tags from given pkg/lists
  tags2lists -- ANDs tags to output lists matching them all

Footnotes
~~~~~~~~~

[1] tests/:
    currently abandoned due to difficulties of maintaining
    sample images with different designs, were used with 4.0

[2] profiles/isolinux/:
    see also profiles/scripts.d/03-syslinux

[3] profiles/ltsp/:
    due to apt-get --print-uris being employed for components,
    it's not feasible to put conflicting packages into single
    RPMS.main; which is unfortunate since otherwise this one
    and potentially quite a few other package collection would
    better be put into main

[4] profiles/pkg/lists/*:
    these support "# comment" and might be substituted
    by configure script if adjusted so; a special form
    "# tags: tag1, tag2, ..." is used to categorize lists
    (so far no distro target uses tags to build even if
    it's already possible in the simplest all-AND form)

[5] profiles/pkg/groups/*:
    freedesktop files with additional X-Alterator-* tags
    used currently by alterator-pkg (if it's included in
    install-steps file of corresponding installer-distro-*)

[6] profiles/pkg/tags/:
    this directory is autopopulated via "make all" in pkg/;
    please take care not to invent unneeded tags, consult
    devel-distro@ in case of doubt

References
~~~~~~~~~~

Please note that www.altlinux.org holds content in Russian,
English translations are at en.altlinux.org (mkimage docs
are rather missing as of Dec 2009).

* http://www.altlinux.org/Mkimage:
  short intro page for mkimage
* http://www.altlinux.org/Mkimage/Profiles/Desktop
  crash course into mkimage-profiles-desktop
* http://www.altlinux.org/WhiteLabel:
  refactoring considerations

Blame
~~~~~

* Alexey Gladkov <legion@altlinux> for mkimage
* Anton Boyarshinov <boyarsh@altlinux> for mkimage-profiles-desktop
* Michael Shigorin <mike@altlinux> for wiki pages referenced above,
  casual havoc during profile rewrites, and this text too
* numerous contributors to this and that ;-)
