Water Bomb is released
The Baserock team, and Codethink Limited are proud to announce the fourth public release of the Baserock system build infrastructure. In this release, Water Bomb we are pleased to be able to showcase the ability of Baserock to build a system entirely from Git repositories.
What is in Water Bomb
Water Bomb is a development release of Baserock. It consists of
four VM images; base and devel for x86_32 and x86_64.
base is a relatively small system, used as an example target
image, and devel is a system with all the tools required to
build itself, plus development conveniences like text editors and
debugging tools. The images are available on the download page.
What has changed since Square Pyramid?
The morph build command can now build components directly from a
system branch workspace - so it's possible to make changes and
build a new system without having to push your code anywhere.
We are in the process of migrating the server software on
git.baserock.org. As part of this, the repos that are part of
Baserock itself now have an extra 'baserock/' component in their
URLs, so baserock:morphs becomes baserock:baserock/morphs, etc.
New command: morph expand-repo, to expand URL prefixes on the
commandline.
$ morph expand-repo baserock:baserock/morphs
Original: baserock:baserock/morphs
pull: git://git.baserock.org/baserock/baserock/morphs
push: ssh://git@git.baserock.org/baserock/baserock/morphs
New command: morph status, to show what repositories in a system
branch have outstanding changes:
$ morph status
On branch baserock/release/water-bomb, root baserock:baserock/morphs
baserock:baserock/morphs: uncommitted changes
e2fsprogs was added to the devel stratum.
util-linux was updated, to fix a problem with losetup.
Minor changes and bugfixes:
- Baserock systems have an
/etc/os-releasefile, and a .meta file stored in/baserockalong with the .meta files for the chunks and strata. - Disk images are now compressed with
gzip -1after building. morph --helpoutput is better organised.morph mergewarns if a chunk will be petrified or unpetrified as the result of a merge.- Morphologies are validated more thoroughly when processed, to catch spelling mistakes in key names and other issues.
- Tarball rootfs support now works correctly.
How do I get started?
You can find a quick start guide on the Baserock wiki and also a short guide on developing with Baserock which follows on from the quick start and shows you how to get to the point of proving you can build Baserock within Baserock.
From that point on, your imagination is the limit. We're working on several things we hope to showcase later in the year and you can follow some of that development in the Git repositories we publish.
How do I get in contact
The Baserock project has an IRC channel and mailing list for developers to gather and discuss anything associated with Baserock. It is strongly recommended that you use the IRC and lists to contact the team for anything associated with the public development of Baserock. We also have a mailing list for announcements which will be notified of any new releases or big developments in Baserock.
Should you manage to find a bug in Baserock, we'd like to hear from you. You can find our bug reporting guidelines on the Baserock wiki and we will do our best to help.
We hope you enjoy experimenting with Baserock and look forward to hearing about any cool things you do with our work.
Sam Thursfield (On behalf of the Baserock team)