ostree/gnomeos/README-install.md

Overview

http://ostree.gnome.org is the sole build/deploy server right now.

Notably http://ostree.gnome.org/repo is an OSTree repo which holds binaries.

To install, right now you need to build the 'ostree' git module somehow. I personally use jhbuild, but you could make an RPM/.deb or whatever too.

Replace ~/src with whereever you keep source code.

$ cd ~/src $ git clone git://git.gnome.org/ostree $ cd ostree jhbuild buildone -nf(basename $(pwd))

Now we need to run the install script as root.

$ su -

~/src/ostree/gnomeos/gnomeos-install.sh

Now you may need to edit your GRUB configuration. This part varies for GRUB 1 versus GRUB 2. The GRUB 2 bits in "15_ostree" don't really work yet. I'm just manually writing GRUB 1 entries.

Running

Once you have a GRUB entry set up, just reboot. Log in as root, there's no password.

One of the first things you'll need to do is add a user. The userid must match the one from your "host" distribution, since we share /home. For example, let's say my login "walters" has uid/gid 500. You should run:

$ groupadd -g 500 walters $ useradd -u 500 -g 500 walters $ passwd walters

Finally, you can start gdm:

$ /usr/sbin/gdm

Updating

After you've installed, you can download updates like this:

$ su -

cd /ostree

ostree-pull --repo=repo origin gnomeos-3.4-i686-{runtime,devel}

This just pulls data into your local repository; if you want a checked-out filesystem root for them, the easiest is to use the gnomeos-update-branches script that comes with ostree. The script currently assumes that the repository is in the current directory.

~/src/ostree/gnomeos/yocto/gnomeos-update-branches.sh

In the future this will be part of a system administrator oriented utility (e.g. "ostreeadm").

Next steps

Now that you have your OSTree install and know how to update it, you probably want to do something useful with it. OSTrees main mission is to assist developers and testers, so lets explain how it lets a tester isolate a problem.

Bisecting

Say you've updated your OSTree installation, and after booting it, you notice a new problem. What now ? You probably want to identify exactly when this problem was introduced. A good technique for doing so is known as 'bisection'. Here is how it works:

[...sadly I don't know how to do this with OSTree]

Once you have identified the binary revision that introduced the problem, you can go one step further. OSTree stores the source revisions that each commit has been built from, so you can retrieve the exact source changes that are likely responsible for the problem you've just tracked down.

[...fill me in]

Local changes

If are a developer, at this point you may try your hand at fixing the problem in the source. Of course, you want to build the module with your change, and add it to your OSTree installation to verify that it fixes the problem. Here is how:

[...?]