Qt 5 and 6 package translation files for common widgets that programs
can opt to use. These translation files take up about 2 MB of the final
iso image.
When the translations are removed, qt is designed to show messages
in the default language, English.
SystemRescue currently contains 2 programs using qt5 and qt6. I
tested both with the default en_US.UTF-8 and custom de_DE.UTF-8 locales:
featherpad: contains it's own complete translation. It's UI uses the
configured locale and it works regardless if the qt-translations are
installed or not.
yubikey-personalization-gui: doesn't use the translations at all and
is always shown in English. Removing the qt translations doesn't change
anything.
So programs coming with SystemRescue by default aren't affected. Also
other qt programs the user could install won't be affected. Only if the
user also changes the default locale, parts of some programs might be
now shown in English, like many other parts of SystemRescue that don't
come with translations.
The KeepassXC documentation takes up 5 MB of final iso image size.
This is quite excessive.
Removing the documentation doesn't impair program usage. The documentation
can easily be accessed online from the KeepassXC website, it is directly
linked in the help menu.
Activating md raid or lvm means that the kernel changes the metadata like
timestamps and mount counts of the devices and writes them to disk.
Also reconstructing degraded md raid devices is automatically activated.
There are cases when writing to disks is absolutely not wanted. For example
when restoring data from broken disks or when doing forensics.
The nomdlvm boot commandline option prevents any activation and thus
not wanted writes. If the user wants to use md or lvm with the option
set, all md or lvm devices have to be manually found and activated.
nomdlvm is only implemented as boot commandline option and does not use
the YAML config file. The reason is that the udev rules are evaluated
before sysrescue-configuration.lua is run, so the YAML config is not
ready yet. Moving nomdlvm after sysrescue-configuration.lua would be
an invasive operation and modify the activation order of all md and lvm
devices for all cases, increasing the probability of regressions.
Also udev rules offer a direct access to boot commandline options, making
implementation straightforward and robust.
The dns library used by lua requires /etc/hosts to exist, otherwise all
requests for name resolution are denied. This meant that using the
sysrescuecfg boot option with a http URL and hostname did not work
while using an IP worked.
This patch adds an empty /etc/hosts file to the initramfs image to fix this.
Initializing the pacman key database during boot can take considerable time
and there is no locking during this time against concurrent file access.
This can lead to problems when installing packages soon after reboot.
This also speeds up the boot process.
Additional disk space requirement is about 1 MByte.
Fixes#290
glibc recently changed how dns name resolution is implemented. It now
needs additional .so files that are loaded dynamically. Include these
files in the initramfs image.
Firefox doesn't use the system CA database but has it's own. Use the
policies.json file to let Firefox trust the entries from the
sysconfig.ca-trust of the YAML config too.
There is no dependency on NetworkManager being actually online when
sysrescue-initialize.py calls load-srm to honor the late_load_srm config
option. So without this patch this can fail when the network takes a
few seconds until the link is actually up.
Fixes#288
syslinux: this is already installed, but only through a dependency.
syslinux is essential to build a bootable image. So this should be
explicitly listed and not just as a dependency.
fatresize (10 KB): allows to resize FAT filesystems. Helpful for
example when you have to grow a EFI System Partition because it
ran out of space.
kexec-tools (70 KB): allows to directly boot into a given kernel +
initramfs without going through the BIOS or bootloader before.
Useful when the bootloader is broken, you can't immediately fix
it but want to boot the original system.
When the lua script parses the YAML config, it converts a `1` to `1.0` because in
lua all numbers are floats. So it writes out `1.0`, which is then loaded by the
python scripts later. Make the type conversion for booleans aware of this.
This allows to write something like `ar_disable: 1` in the YAML and have it
acted upon as expected.
The recently implemented type casting code doesn't work intuitively for
booleans: for example it treats a string "0" as False and doesn't show
an error message for it. So the user might be unaware of this.
So add a dedicated conversion function for booleans.
Also add checks for conversions from dicts and lists, forbid to cast them
to strings because that is most probably not what the user wants.
With the new config file merging the user could accidently overwrite the
config values with wrong types, for example a boolean with a dict or list.
This could lead to the script aborting with an exception.
Use explicit type casting and default values to ensure correct operation
in this case. This is the same as recently implemented for autorun.
Implement a dedicated conversion function for booleans to for example
treat a string "0" as False, python by default would interpret it as True.
