ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Ricardo Salveti de Araujo <ricardo.salveti@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Ondrej Kubik
<ondrej.kubik@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi
>
> We should keep in mind that eventually Custom, Ubuntu, Device images will
> land in separate partitions. This is essential for what Steve mentioned,
> each partition will clearly define playground for entity responsible for
> it's maintenance and updating. Customisation partition will be updated
> independently by OEM/Carries. Ubuntu partition by us, and device partition
> by OEM. Any overlaps will cause trouble for updates.
> Copying files from device partition to Ubuntu partition is recipe for
> disaster, even as separate folder. One day somebody will write update script
> deploying entire Ubuntu system image, instead of delta, this would instantly
> brick the phone, since first line of the update script would be 'format'
> ubuntu partition, nuking all device specific files...
> Same way we will want customisation as separate partition, otherwise one day
> Carrier will decide to push this brilliant update with new 100MB bloatware
> app, which will eat free space in Ubuntu partition failing next Ubuntu
> system update....
>
> Also I'd like to get terminology right here.  Can we stop referring to
> "device tarball"? Tarball is only one of the way we will deploy files to the
> phone. There is no way we can use "device tarball" and recovery mode on
> assembly line, where images will be blasted in with flashing tools. So for
> sake of this discussing, let's not refer to any tarballs and focus on
> partitions/filesystems.
> Additionally  device tarball holds android system.img which is loop mounted.
> Anything else I can accept in it is boot and recovery images for given
> device, but nothing else. If there are any other device specific files
> there, where are they gonna land? If in device partition aka system.img,
> then they should be there already. Otherwise we will get to point where we
> need to copy those files somewhere, and that is no go as Steve mentioned.
>
> So my vote would be, all device specific files should in device partition as
> long as we can honour this. This is mounted to /system in Ubuntu so it's
> easily accessible. And as mentioned before, ubuntu system should have hooks
> and look there for device specific files.
> There is no point to elaborate about each file we identified now, yes some
> can be avoided, but we all agree there will be device specific files and
> those need to live somewhere, and Ubuntu system image is wrong answer.
> If in time we will reach point we will need to store device specific
> libraries linking against libc, we should mod Android build scripts to make
> it so. This should be easy anyway, since it's already building for various
> host platforms.
>
> Oli about development hindering, I don't agree with you.
> device/adroid image is just another mounted image, why not provide simple
> tool which will mount device image as writable, same way we provide this for
> Ubuntu image? Them just push your modified file to /system/..... No need to
> compile android bit. It's same as what you are doing now. You also don't
> recreate Ubuntu image to test your new config file.
> Again try to think of it, that one day those should be two separate
> partitions, rather than loop mounted image living inside another image....

How can we solve the same issue when using a pure Ubuntu stack
(without Android)? Guess using a separated partition to handle the
device specific / OEM files would be the easiest way, only problem
then is that you're not necessarily able anymore to generate the same
image just consuming bits from the archive.

Cheers,
-- 
Ricardo Salveti de Araujo