[Soc-coordination] Status report for my project

[Martín Ferrari]

Hi there,

Sorry for being so silent, until now I didn't have much to show and
tell. But now it reached a nice status: the program can now complete a
run!

First of all, the "thing" now has a proper name: pancután (unix name
pancutan), which is a stupid pun about avoiding (skin) burns and
unusable debian CDs. (Pancután is a vintage lotion for burns in
Argentina, I think most joungsters won't even recognise the name).

Since it has a name, also it has a alioth project page [1], SVN
repository [2] and mailing list [3], for which I am the only
subscriber by now.

If you want to try it out, just checkout the repository and run:

$ ./pancutan <list of iso files>

If you set the environment variable DEBUG to a number greater than
zero, you get debugging info.

Its dependencies are currently libyaml-perl (or libyaml-syck-perl for
faster operation), fuseiso9660 and an user which fuse permissions.

Of course, as I've been working in the architecture, there aren't many
tests. But you can try the powerpc business card iso [4] for which
pancutan currently detects that it's too big for a business card cd:

$ ./pancutan /media/IOMega/mirror/isos/debian-40r0-powerpc-businesscard.iso
E: image-too-big
 - The ISO file is too big for the target media
 + 73207808

---

About the architecture.

I have written a draft spec for the plug-ins in the wiki [5]. I have
to properly document that, but you can get an idea from it.

The general idea is that a directory is scanned for modules,
"requires" them, and extracts metadata embedded into them (I'm still
thinking that this can be separated to delay compiling of modules when
they're needed, but I haven't decided it yet). From that metadata,
tasks and tags (errors and warnings) definitions are loaded. Also a
lot of internal sanity checking is performed.

There isn't any fixed order of execution, it's constructed based on
the dependencies the tasks define. And it has been thought from the
start with parallelisation in mind, although that functionality hasn't
been written yet (I'll do it during this week)

At this point, I'd like to other, more experienced people take a look
at it. So feedback is very welcomed, specially from you, Steve :).

Also, maybe it's time to annouce it to debian-cd/d-i/cdds/planet
people, what do you think?

Regards, Tincho.

[1] http://pancutan.alioth.debian.org/
[2] svn://svn.debian.org/pancutan/
[3] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pancutan-devel
[4] http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r0/powerpc/iso-cd/debian-40r0-powerpc-businesscard.iso,
[5]  http://wiki.debian.org/DebianCDTester

-- 
Martín Ferrari