Ideas for a future version of febootstrap.


The name
--------

The name 'febootstrap' confuses everyone.  I'd like to rename the
program to 'supermin' and rename 'febootstrap-supermin-helper' to
'supermin-reconstruct'.


hostfiles
---------

'hostfiles' causes lots of trouble, because it bakes path dependencies
into the supermin appliance.

We propose to replace this with a list of root packages.  Lines in
hostfiles beginning with a "+" sign are a root package, eg:

  +bash
  +coreutils

We then query RPM or dpkg to get a list of hostfiles at appliance boot
time.  eg. For rpm we'd do the rpmlib equivalents of:

  rpm -ql bash    # list of files in bash
  rpm -qR bash    # what bash requires
  rpm -q --whatprovides <depN>    # recursively look up each requires

(If this is too slow, aggressively cache the results)

Some files still need to be stored at build time, basically %config
files.

Unclear what to do about kernels if we make this change.

'hostfiles' may still be needed for a handful of files that we really
want to copy in.  Notable ones: /etc/localtime and /etc/resolv.conf.


Store %post scripts
-------------------

Can we get the %post scripts and store them in a directory in the
appliance?


Directories
-----------

Reconstruction is tied to having directories being created before they
are used.  We should try to remove this limitation as it's really
quite unnecessary.
