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 # 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.