On 01.01.2024 02:19, David C. Rankin wrote: ...snip...

[...] I want to see the pages in the wiki be useful for completing the relevant task without being referred to 5 different non-specific locations in other pages where you left guessing why you ended up that page. ...snip...

Regardless of where this behavior happens, a wiki, the Arch wiki, any other Knowledge Base type documentation platform, duplicating information is rarely ever the correct approach. Self-contained articles are nice and helpful in theory but the maintenance effort is multiplied by number of articles when you have to change the information on every page it is put (if you can even track that) instead of just changing the page that is **referenced** everywhere once. Regards, Khorne

You have a very fair take on this. Let me explain a few things:

To make the comparison with installation on LUKS or LVM fair, the guide would explain how to install Arch Linux inside OSTree using only the core utilities of the OSTree project. Neither the LUKS nor the LVM installation guides are wholly dependent on the contents of a git repository whose description is "Scripts for generating my personal Arch setup as an ostree deployment."

1) That repository started out as a "personal rootfs generator" but turned into a generic tool to generate any arch-based rootfs and also install it from within the live ISO. The description is simply outdated because I forgot to update it. On the top of the wiki page I put a note that the guide is WIP and I would have improved it over the coming weeks but it got moved faster than I was able to do so. 2) The tool "archlinux-ostree" exists because both creating a rootfs and creating a new ostree system require to be in very specific environments. The tool does that using podman-containers and chroots. Also, one exception aside, the tool doesn't actually wrap any ostree commands - it just sets up a certain environment and then either gives you a shell(e.g. for installing the bootloader) or runs your script(for generating a rootfs). So unfortunately, doing this without arch-ostree is simply unrealistic and tedious. Personally I don't see why not relying on simple tools would be a requirement though given that even arch itself does that by providing tons of tools like pacstrap or arch-chroot. My secret hope actually was to make the tool good enough so it can be moved to the official archlinux gitlab and turned into an official tool.

As an Arch user who was not familiar with OSTree, I would find the wiki page more helpful if it started with a description of what OSTree is and why it is useful, with links to the official project and its documentation. Then, technical content that starts by explaining how to use the project's official tools to work with Arch and OSTree together. Finally, if your script allows users to do something that is not possible using the project's official tools (like overlaying pacman to update an image, maybe), then its use and why it is necessary would follow in a later section.

That's very valuable feedback, thanks. I probably would have added a lot of that information later on, but it's great to have feedback with actual expectations from a reader. On Mon, Jan 1, 2024 at 7:55 AM Jaron Kent-Dobias wrote:

On Sunday, 31 December 2023 at 19:09 (+0100), Michael Zimmermann wrote:

...

I've put some work into making it easy to install Arch Linux inside OSTree. I have started creating a guide at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Install_Arch_Linux_inside_OSTree with the intention of that being just another installation method like LUKS or LVM.

To make the comparison with installation on LUKS or LVM fair, the guide would explain how to install Arch Linux inside OSTree using only the core utilities of the OSTree project. Neither the LUKS nor the LVM installation guides are wholly dependent on the contents of a git repository whose description is "Scripts for generating my personal Arch setup as an ostree deployment."

...

Unfortunately, the page was moved to my personal space with the reason: "personal install guide for the author's os-tree wrapper, does not belong in the official namespace". This sounds like the Arch Linux project doesn't want to support this installation method. Is that correct? If yes, why?

I am not a wiki contributor, but it seems clear that your utility's own description motivates the maintainer's view that your method is a personal install guide. To my eye, it appears more like a way to promote your script than a way to teach Arch users haw to use OSTree. If you want to promote your utility to other Arch users, a better place to start than writing a wiki page would be to use the "Community Contributions" forum [1].

As an Arch user who was not familiar with OSTree, I would find the wiki page more helpful if it started with a description of what OSTree is and why it is useful, with links to the official project and its documentation. Then, technical content that starts by explaining how to use the project's official tools to work with Arch and OSTree together. Finally, if your script allows users to do something that is not possible using the project's official tools (like overlaying pacman to update an image, maybe), then its use and why it is necessary would follow in a later section.

Best, Jaron

[1]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewforum.php?id=27

Happy new Year :)! Maybe it's possible to split the Wiki. We have got the official Arch Linux repositories and apart from "third party repositories" we have got the Arch User Repository. I don't know if it's possible, but maybe we could have an official Arch Wiki and a Wiki that is kind of an "Arch User Wiki". Regards, Ralf