ubuntu-core image hygiene

[Manik Taneja]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 5:29 AM, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> hi,
>
> Tl;dr;
>
> - managing seeds for ubuntu-core changed from task to meta package
> - x86 based ubuntu-core snaps lost multiple megabytes of fat ...
>
> And here the details:
>
> With the switch to ubuntu-image and the new gadget handling that comes
> along with this, we were now able to drop all bits of bootloaders we
> shipped inside the rootfs (bootloader binaries (specifically grub) are
> actually shipped inside the gadget now and do not need to be copied
> from the rootfs into the boot partition any more like we did in the
> past with ubuntu-device-flash).
>
> While working on dropping grub from ubuntu-core one large problem arose
> ... our seeds used tasks instead of a meta package. Since we can not
> change the seed itself after a release is out (snappy is based on
> xenial) this makes it impossible to actually drop packages ... at the
> same time the only way to add new packages is to add very ugly hacks to
> livecd-rootfs to import them directly during the rootfs build.
>
> Since the classic ubuntu has always had similar issues with the above
> when doing point releases, it was actually completely switched from
> tasks to meta packages (relatively recently) ... i did the same for
> ubuntu-core now so that package addition/removal gets easier and to be
> in sync with the main distro.
>
> If you need to add/remove a package in the ubuntu-core snap, please use
> the ubuntu-core-meta package now (currently in the snappy-dev/image
> PPA, it will be SRUed into xenial-updates proper before GA)
>
> I am happy to report that thanks to the switch i was also able to drop
> about 50 lines of awful hacks from the build system that injected
> packages at build time in an undocumented way :)
>
> Now to the more exciting bits ...
>
> Dropping all grub bits from the amd64 ubuntu-core snap got us from a
> 75.1MB package size down to 66.9MB ...
>
> Likewise the i386 snap went from 72.1MB down to 64.9MB
>
> I know that a bunch of people will actually celebrate that massive size
> reduction (hey manik :) ).
>
woot woot ;) a big thank you for cleaning this up. what's causing the
difference
still between the 2 architectures?

/manik
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