On 19.04.2012 15:50, 686f6c6d wrote:
1. autoyast generates a lot of messages. For an autoyast dev, this might be wonderful, but dumb users like myself are simply lost in tens of thousands of messages. It makes finding errors in the logs really hard, especially when you don't know what string(s) you're looking for. It would be great if there was, for example, an additional warnings-and-errors-only log.
I know what you mean but it's not autoyast that is so verbose, it's yast as whole. If you do a manual installation or an autoinstallation makes no big difference. Especially libstorage and the package resolver are way too verbose. I can not change that easily. The loglines start like this: 2012-04-18 14:18:56 <3> 2012-04-18 14:18:56 <2> 2012-04-18 14:18:56 <1> the 3 means it was logged by y2error a 2 means it's a warning a 1 means, it's just a y2milestone (like a 'I was here' message for devlopers). but I know, reading a y2log file requires some experience
2. autoyast generates a lot of "noise" in diffs. When cloning a system with yast or editing it manually and then running it through yast again to check for errors, yast changes the profile in various ways. This makes it sometimes harder to see the "real" differences. (In general, one could say everything is fine because the inconsistencies below all "converge" towards a final state, but nevertheless I sometimes wonder why these things happen.)
autoyast transforms the XML file into ycp data structures and feeds those to the yast modules. The yast modules works with those and returns data structures back to autoyast where they are transformed into XML again. There is no information about any order that was in the XML file. The yast module often also returns the default values - even if they did not exist in the XML file before. That's important if defaults change. If a key gets lost, it's either not supported anymore or you found a bug.
2.a) (this is new in 12.1 and did not happen before:) for some reason the DNS settings are not kept for stage 2, so I need this script in 12.1:
please open a bug for that
2.b)<keep_install_network> is _always_ deleted by yast.
you mean the UI always drops that value? That's a bug then. Bugzilla please.
2.c) even though a<runlevel> section exists, the package yast2-runlevel is not automatically installed.
that's with every module. Every yast module tells autoyast "In your XML File, I am <bla_bla>" So autoyast knows whom to feed with the data from the XML file. The good thing with that is, AutoYaST itself does not have to know all yast modules that have autoyast support. You can create an autoyast module without changing anything in autoyast for it. The bad thing about that is, that autoyast can not know what to do with unknown sections. If there is a <runlevel> section but no yast2-runlevel module installed, then autoyast does not know what to do with that section - it ignores it then. Maybe an error popup would be nice in that case. Autoyast reads that information from the desktop files in /usr/share/applications/YaST2/
2.d) even though mail settings (aliases, mailrelay) exist, the package yast2-mail is not automatically installed.
same as above AutoYaST itself knows nothing about mail or which module is required to deal with those keys. When you install yast2-mail, then autoyast knows what to do with those keys because the desktop file is there
2.e) When *cloning* an existing system, I see inconsistent and sometimes non-helpful behavior. What happens is that for certain settings (see below), there are different cases that can happen: 1. tag doesn't exist vs.
that's not so nice
2. tag exists but is empty vs.
then the default is an empty string or the system has an empty string configured for that key
settings where I have seen this in 12.1 are: <languages>,<filesystem_id>,<partition_id>,
languages is probably really empty on the system If you don't have secondary languages installed it's empty. That's okay. filesystem_id I should remove partition_id should never be empty - that would be a bug
<displaymanager_shutdown>, <displaymanager_xserver_tcp_port_6000_open>,<run_updatedb_as>, <hibernate_system>,<smtpd_listen_remote>,<dhclient_client_id>, <nss_base_{passwd,group,shadow}>.
okay, those I don't know. They come from different yast modules and different developers. I'd have to check one by one and get in contact with the developer (three different developers in this case)
I have only had my eye really close on the<password_settings> section, the behavior was like this:
if you think you find inconsistency, then please open a bug report. I'll take a look and fix it or assign it to the right developer
2.f) While the sections in the profile seem to be sorted alphabetically by yast, 1. the order of<users> seems to be random,
they are probably stored in a hash in yast internally. So the order is the order the ycp-interpreter has sorted the keys in the hash-map That does not help you but explains why the order is random for the naked eye :)
2. the order of the<*packages> and<*patterns> sections seems to be nonrandom, but isn't nonalphabetic either.
same as 1 maybe. I'd have to take a closer look
Does the order of these sections matter?
no, for users and patterns the order does not matter. But autoyast does not know that, so it can not sort stuff like that by itself (well, for patterns that's not true, that really in the autoyast core) but users must be sorted by yast2-users
If not, could the please be sorted deterministically (alphabetically, or, f.e., in order of UIDs for the users)?
that could be changed for sure in the yast2-users module packages and patterns are handled in the autoyast core which is code that I maintain by myself.
That all sounds so negative. Let me end with a big thank you to all contributors: Thank you. autoyast saves me a lot of time. (:
never mind. Feedback is always appreciated - I don't take anything personal :) I know how frustrating it can be to debug something for days -- ciao, Uwe Gansert SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer Home: http://www.suse.de/~ug - Blog: http://suse.gansert.net listening to: "Traum vom Tod II" by Subway to Sally -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+owner@opensuse.org