This was a one step forward, one step back kind of day, as I moved the working stuff from yesterday out of my personal propellor config file and into the secret-project repository, and stumbled over some issues while doing so.

But, I had a crucial idea last night. When propellor is used to build an installer image, the installer does not need to bootstrap the target system from scratch. It can just copy the installer to the target system, and then run propellor there, with a configuration that reverts any properties that the installer had but the installed system should not. This will be a lot faster and avoid duplicate downloads.

That's similar to how d-i's live-installer works, but simpler, since with propellor there's a short list of all the properties that the installer has, and propellor knows if a property can be reverted or not.

Today's work was sponsored by Riku Voipio.