[arch-releng] Quick ISO building HOWTO

[Aaron Griffin]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 4:29 AM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> Aaron/Gerhard, can you share with us exactly how you build the iso's? So
> everyone can do it...
> (I would like to document this on the wiki too, I couldn't find a
> tutorial/wiki page/manpage)
>
> What I have:
> * git clone git://projects.archlinux.org/archiso.git
> * cd archiso/archiso
> * sudo make install
> (all of this to be replaced with 'pacman -Sy archiso' when a new archiso
> release is done, which is planned after 2009-01 release)
>
> cd ../configs/install-iso
> sudo make all-iso (or ftp-iso, or core-iso)

Correct!

> questions:
> 1) any specific requirements on /etc/pacman.conf? (related to
> settings/available repos?)
> 2) how do you build iso's with only core or with core+testing available? by
> just (un)commenting testing from /etc/pacman.conf?

mkarchiso uses your system's pacman.conf, so whatever is enabled there
is enabled in the ISO. To build official ISOs we should disable
testing before building.

> 3) assuming that the relevant repositories are frozen, if I build an iso on
> my system, and someone else builds the iso on his system, will the iso's
> match perfectly? (eg same md5sums)

Well, the md5sums probably won't match. I imagine something injects
dates or something of the sort - tar does, I know.

> I think it would be useful in the future we build locally first and test it,
> and then instead of uploading to gerolde, we can just rebuild it there?

Testing is always preferred. Part of the reason I have been uploading
them without testing is simply that I have little time at home. It is
easy for me to ssh and run "make all" and then scp them, so others can
test, but it's hard for me to test remotely.