linaro-image-tools requires network access to install include-debs hwpacks

milestoning for next release. this should be fixed in backports as well. maybe spin a 0.4.4 to get this fix out of the door if 0.5.0 is too far away.

Thanks

I'd like to know why is it so important that l-m-c doesn't depend on
network access when hwpacks are created with the include-debs option? I
agree this makes total sense and we should definitely do it but I don't
understand why it's so important given that I haven't seen much user
demand for it

So actually it doesn't require network access; I created an efikamx and a beagle (QEMU) image without network and they both booted fine. You get a warning that apt couldn't refresh some lists and that old indexes have been used instead, but it just work.

Do we actually need to keep this bug open? Technically, I think it would be nice if we could avoid hitting the network (as in, not even try to), but I'm not sure APT allows for that, and it's of limited usefulness since it currently works offline.

I was told by james that we dont do a && true for apt-get update and that this would make l-m-c fail if there is no network available and might not even have proper proxy set up etc..

While Loic says its working, http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-dev/2011-March/003048.html indicates to me that its not a complete non-issue.

why its important: we want to support corporate environments that have a bad or non-existing internet connection on the machine used to burn our images.

I think the reason it broke is because APT thought it was talking to the target archive, while it was talking to some corporate proxy returning other files which broke the indices. Would you pull your network cable out, it would work :-) Also, the main issue for this person is the lack of proxy support, we don't setup the proxy in the target to be the same as on the host; bug #673570.

While hwpacks might be enough to have all packages, they might also not be enough; for instance, we might want to install btrfs-tools if your rootfs lacks it, or add missing dependencies.

I'll take it that it would be useful if we supported 100% offline.

in any case, this is a principal matter. we want l-m-c not to access network. please consider to reblock release. I want this wart eliminated before it gets old and we start to accept this.

and again: btrfs-tools needs to be in our images if we want to support it.

One issue I see is that you say "when the debs are included in the hwpack", but I'm
not clear how we decide if we have everything that we need to install without network.

Perhaps we need to try, and then fall back to network if it doesn't work, but that has
some very unhelpful failure modes.

Thanks,

James

we don't want to use network for include-debs mode. basically saying include-debs=yes tells the tool to "don't try to be smart and fix things". if stuff is missing on image its an RC bug because folks couldn't install this without having network.

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