Late Friday evening, I realized that the secret-project's user interface should be a specialized propellor config file editor. Eureka! With that in mind, I reworked how the UserInput value is passed from the UI to propellor; now there's a UserInput.hs module that starts out with an unconfigured value, and the UI rewrites that file. This has a lot of benefits, including being able to test it without going through the UI, and letting the UI be decoupled into a separate program.

Also, sped up propellor's disk image building a lot. It already had some efficiency hacks, to reuse disk image files and rsync files to the disk image, but it was still repartitioning the disk image every time, and the whole raw disk image was being copied to create the vmdk file for VirtualBox. Now it only repartitions when something has changed, and the vmdk file references the disk image, which sped up the secret-project's 5 gigabyte image build time from around 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

With that procrastination^Wgroundwork complete, I was finally at the point of testing the secret-project running on the disk image. There were a few minor problems, but within an hour it was successfully partitioning, mounting, and populating the target disk.

Still have to deal with boot loader installation and progress display, but the end of the secret-project is in sight.

Today's work was sponsored by Trenton Cronholm on Patreon.