Re: Shipping more installer images?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> skribis:

> On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 01:47:25PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Mathieu Othacehe <othacehe@gnu.org> skribis:
>> 
>> >> I'm actually not really sure how one would use the installer on one of
>> >> the boards. I think the bare-bones disk-images would be best; just
>> >> download it and flash it onto the board or an SD card and edit
>> >> /etc/config.scm to add your user and services. Or to boot up into the
>> >> installer and overwrite itself.
>> >
>> > The CI is already building substitutes for two images
>> > (hurd-barebones-qcow2-image and pine64-barebones-raw-image). We could
>> > maybe release 1.2 version of those images.
>> 
>> Keep in mind that images use space at ftp.gnu.org and also take time to
>> build (having CI up-to-date helps with that, but it doesn’t not
>> eliminate build times due to the ‘update-guix-package’ dance that takes
>> place during “make release”.)
>
> We could also list out the commands for building the image and have
> "community images" built and tested by people who actually have the
> boards.

Yeah, though “community images” could rhyme with
“we’re-not-sure-what’s-inside images”.  :-)

>> Likewise, if we ship more images, we should update the “System
>> Installation” section accordingly and be clear about what users can
>> expect.
>
> My slightly more featureful pine64plus image I built for myself came out
> to 1.5 GiB and 291 MiB with bzip2. I don't know how much space the other
> images or x86* images are.

Cool.

> We could also build and test them on a different schedule and upload
> them at a later date as they're shown to be working.

Hmm, tricky, security-wise.

Anyway, let’s work on that for 1.3!

Ludo’.