There's a bunch of additions to the MATE package list:
thanks viy@ for pulling extras into autoimports,
several more tweaks done due to hints by dek@,
and openssh packages added for debugging convenience.

The kernel's been changed for the latest one (un-def).

Someone over the internets suggested that such a LiveCD exist:
http://www.opennet.ru/openforum/vsluhforumID3/85817.html#24
...but then disappeared in the thin air, sigh.

- stage2@live

There's no use of a rescue image when it has no firmware
for the controller in the system being worked on...
so added some.

This isn't ready for general consumption (just as centos one)
but the notion of REPO is floating around along with apt-conf
thoughts, and it might still be useful to someone poking around
conf.d/test.mk.

Request hasher-pkg-init.spec from mike@ or led@ if interested;
the experiments were carried out using openSUSE 11.4 repository
and slightly patched hasher (cpio blacklist for devices).

A few more items were asking for some attention.

In particular, build examples should start with
the most basic, error-proof and quick targets.

This part of docs was pleading to put it into a small shell
script; it was done to facilitate kas@' debugging efforts
so that qemu-system-ppc might eventually get fixed, thus
livecd-qemu-arch package now "obsoletes" this file.

Thanks both drool@ for his mild frustration with the current
documentation as well as Greg Kroah-Hartman, Heikki Orsila
and Neil Brown for http://lwn.net/Articles/504814/ -- the docs
should really emphasize *why* something is done, not *how*,
as the "how" part is better documented with the code itself
(that doesn't mean that "the big picture" isn't needed).

That sub/stage2/install2 was somewhat clumsy actually as it looked
like a hierarchical thing while being a substitution thing:
generic stage2 would get put in place renamed as install2.

This could only get worse with hierarchical features which have
already been both requested and considered for quite a time,
and "stage2 at install2" reads much more naturally.

Finishes what 3dd02033
has essentially done... the path seems to be elsewhere.

Don't remember who exactly recommended this nice and elegant
system monitor but it fits just fine.

There were heaps of "if type -t git" there already;
it wasn't an unintentional mishap but rather a moderate
copy-paste to get the use cases, and now these seem to
have essentially settled.

So time to scrap some dups.

NB: the scripts in the generated profile can't rely on
the contents of the metaprofile (these need to be able
to work in standalone case either), so a bit of crap
still lurks there.

This kind of tools can be badly missing at times.

There's no (convenient) "eject" at times, so it's better to provide
extra ways of booting right away.

Found myself pretty silly while sittin' at the rescue console
and bein' unable to leave the cool server room for a way
more comfortable armchair and a laptop's keyboard...

(yes, it was that disk array needing GPT tools)

Several GPT-related packages added along with
a few more rescue related ones.

- minor improvements

Another feature suggested by Michael Radyuk (torabora):
some images are known alpha/beta quality, it's more handy
to just state this at the build time than to rename by hand.

This trots along the TODO item on text branding
and hopefully helps Michael Radyuk (torabora)
with his feature request to tweak the installer's
"Install ALT Linux" label; as an example, Simply
will now offer to "Install Simply Linux".

The package actually passed the test and just got uploaded
to Sisyphus proper; its aim is to help set up the cross-arch
QEMU build environment.

NB: there are known issues with PPC32-on-x86_64 (which were
the cause for this package and commit to be created in the
first place).

Some images were unbuildable (at least without special setup,
like ve/centos), unusable or just not useful in any meaningful way
(like distro/live-isomd5sum); as these tend to get any attention
during experiments, I decided to put them together in a separate
configuration file that would be effectively skipped if DEBUG
is not requested.

This one was suggested by enp@ for industrial use where
some extra protection for the boot process might be quite
desirable.

If no syslinux ui was specified (the stock configuration paths
ensure there is one) or if it was set to "none" explicitly,
then there's no boot: prompt (let alone any menu).

If there's a need to ensure that the boot process is not
interruptable by Ctrl/Shift/Caps Lock/Scroll Lock.

This provides the means to cross-build at least ARM chroots,
there are known problems with PowerPC for me so far:
http://lists.altlinux.org/pipermail/devel/2012-July/194855.html

See also http://www.altlinux.org/Ports/arm/chroot for /proc magic.

- a bunch of fixups and cleanups

The prerequisites for a cleanup after a successful build
were somewhat weird at this point; now the rules are:
- if DEBUG level is more than 1 or CHECK is set, don't do it;
- otherwise if at least one of the following conditions is true:
  + there's more than one target being built in a row;
  + the build was run by e.g. alterator-mkimage;
  + metaprofile directory is read only
  ...then do a distclean.

If these are still weird or feel unsuitable for profile hacking,
drop me a note (or a patch).

Essentially all the relevant server images got cpufreq setup
and a power button handler; feel free to ask for revert if
this causes any harm in any situation.

It wasn't obvious at all what BRANDING variable is for
(at least until the source code and existing configurarion
has been examined).

`help' used to be the default target described at the very top
of the toplevel makefile but that got broken with g2f307fff;
spotted while discussing m-p with enp@.

Also pulled the pkglist/kmodule part out of distro/server-mini's
recipe and started off a standalone feature based on it.

NB: el-smp kernel now contains aufs as a module but propagator
doesn't try to modprobe it.

"textinst" != "textinstall", so let's just stick to the latter form.

Actually the templates pretending to be usable missed the whole
interactivesystem (sysvinit would get pulled in by services as well).

Fixed somewhat but time and practice will tell.

TDE distros don't really need kdm4 which was proposed as
a replacement by zerg@ (for all the valid reasons but kdm3
wasn't maintained at that point, this has changed since).

The reason is that package lists and individual packages
are processed in different dependency resolution "transactions"
by mkimage; thus if packages (the more precise form of specifying
the contents) come first they can't override the lists appearing
later, and that's wrong: we should be able to specify the more
generic things and then pinpoint the specifics.

This became apparent while authoring [[Mkimage/Profiles/m-p/howto]]
asked for by drool@.

The problem was spotted by Alexander Bandura:
bin/tar2vm wasn't present in the generated profile.

I considered extending features.in/Makefile to include
bin/ alongside lib/ but that would make the helper's location
unpredictable (unless BUILDDIR is specified explicitly) so
restricting sudoers would be harder; worse yet, the copied file
would come with write access for the user building an image.

The implications in restricted case are complex enough anyways
so the recommended implementation would only include a fixed
readonly location like /usr/share/mkimage-profiles/bin/tar2vm
as laid out in doc/vm.txt, and that means it's in the metaprofile
not a generated profile.

Argh, is it overdocumentation already?
The temporary name bites once again...

say() redirects to stderr already.

No need to just go ahead and source files in potentially
unavailable directories, really.