Tried a bit of a spike test today. The idea is to try to make it easier to port an X11 application to the XO by using an overlay FS to capture what an installation does and then annotating the results with information to let Sugar launch the overlay.

Basic pattern is as follows:

* mount a download image as an EXT3 file on loopback
* mount an aufs image as an overlay over the EXT3 image
* bind-mount various utility directories into the image (/dev, /proc, etc)
* chroot into the aufs root
* run yum install -y someapplication (currently I'm doing this manually)
* un-mount everything
* tar up the overlay directory (excluding the common "junk" files)

On the XO (this is the part that doesn't work):

* (have Rainbow) mount the overlay (this won't work at the moment, as aufs seems to not be in the images any more)
* chdir into the overlay
* chroot into the overlay with the executable as the "shell" (preferably as the user, rather than root)

Obviously that's a non-starter if there's no overlay file-system on the image. Which means the spike test's result is basically "not doable right now". For reference, packing up xchm this way takes about 4MB of download and 11MB of installation space (wxPython is in there).

Okay, back to Productive work.