On Fri, 9 May 2014 20:51:07 +0200 sleep_walker@suse.cz wrote:

Hi,

I recently was playing with YaST-less installed openSUSE Factory and run into a lot of issues. I used `zypper --root' to set up whole installation, which is for me similar approach like using debootstrap for Debian. It is handy way to set up system for different machine or to set up chroot environment for different distributions.

That lead me to several questions:

1] Do we support such way of installation? If yes, is it somewhere documented?

I think not.

2] If not yet, do we want to support such way of installation?

It depends on packagers as currently we have installation via yast2 or kiwi builds, both contain various work-arounds for bad defaults of packages or some initial setup ( like password for root user, partitioning ( well ,not case for you), some security tweaks like enabling haveged, networking, bootloader ). If you are interested, I can point you to our finish script which store after package install all needed stuff.

It is nice way to verify package dependencies, easy way to prepare system on other system, etc.

We have to be able to set up system in similar way at least for setting up build environment but that way probably doesn't care about configuration.

yes, if you do not care about booting, networking, security and have fixed passwords, it is much easier.

3] we do support kiwi installation (and SUSE Studio appliances), there was YaST2 directory installation module (but I can't find it anymore), there is build environment setup - does that differ in the way the system is configured after? wouldn't it make sense to unify it (and keep in mind during packaging)?

Yes, it is often talked about it and we still reinvent wheel. It is pretty annoying. I think currently there is two main modules that do it - YaST ( including autoYaST ) and kiwi Josef

Best regards,

Tomas Cech