Porting to a new distribution

When oneSIS finishes configuring the system, control is passed back to the normal boot scripts provided by the distribution. However, these boot scripts often attempt to do things that do not make sense in a read-only environment. Most of these quirks from the distribution's boot scripts are harmless, merely cluttering the normally aesthetic boot sequence with garbage, but some can be detrimental.

Commenting out the detrimental lines from the rc scripts usually eliminates the errors originating from the distribution's rc scripts. oneSIS does this automatically for several distributions by applying a `distribution patch` against the filesystem.

Currently, oneSIS includes patches for several distributions. Minor changes often are made to a distribution's rc scripts between sub-versions of a distribution release. This requires development of a patch to `port' oneSIS to each version of a distribution.

Creating a patch for a newer version of an already supported distribution is simple. An older patch for the same distribution can be used as a model for the new patch. The primary goal of the patch is to ensure that the root filesystem is not mounted read-write at boot time. The patch also comments some actions in the rc scripts that try to write to the root filesystem. This results in a more aesthetic bootup.

At bootup many errors complaining about the 'Read-only file system' may appear on the console. Tracking down the source of these errors and commenting out the offending lines of code is not difficult. However, leaving the script intact and creating configuration directives so that the data is written to the RAM disk instead may be preferable in some cases.

In general, developing a patch for a new version of a distribution can be accomplished with only a few iterations of booting a machine.