Photon RPM OSTree: Preface

To my knowledge, this is the first online documentation that exposes the secrets of RPM-OSTree in a practical manner, with code examples at every step of the way.

While it started as a set of Wiki pages on this topic, it ended up in some sort of a mini online book, taking the reader from theoretical concepts to practical samples, from simple to complex, in a progressive way. I've tried as much as I can not to duplicate information that is already available at the OSTree official site, limiting to only how much is needed to understand the practical examples.

I wrote this mini-book from my own notes, based on my own experiments with this technology and working with my counter-part developer for the feature. It was necessary to understand how RPM-OSTree works in order to prepare test cases for its Photon application, even though public documentation is very sparse and sample code was almost non-existent. We've set the ambitious goal to make it work in Photon OS Technology Preview 2, which has been unveiled at VMWorld 2015 in San Francisco, along with a suite of other products in the same family.

Many thanks to Touseef Liaqat, the main developer who wrote the Photon / RPM-OSTree integration code. Also, many thanks to the people (whom I never met) who designed this cool technology.

Except for some school project and my short stint at Amazon, I have not developed much in Linux. I've worked for Microsoft for over 13 years, where in the old days just pronouncing "Linux" or "open source" was sure to make some people uncomfortable. Now things have changed even over there.

I just turned two months ... of employment with VMware and I'm part of a team that puts together a Linux distribution built from scratch. It's been awesome so far!

Should you have any question, comments, suggestions, technical and language corrections (well, my first language is not English), please write to me at [email protected] or [email protected].

Danut Moraru - August 31th, 2015
Bellevue, WA

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