Kiwi

From openSUSE

this page is under construction - what's the difference to Build Service/KIWI?

KIWI

Building of a new root tree or, in kiwi-speak, a new physical extend.

The building of a new root tree consists of the creation of the directory specified to hold it and the installation of the selected packages on it.

Directory creation

To prevent accidental deletion of an existing root tree, kiwi will stop with an error message if this folder already exists, unless the option --force-new-root is used in which case the existing root will be deleted.

Package installation

First the selected package manager (smart by default) is instructed to use the repositories specified in the image definition file.

Then the packages specified in the 'bootstrap' section are installed. These packages are installed externally to the target root system (i.e. not chroot'ed) and establish the initial environment so the rest of the process may run chroot'ed. Essential packages in this section are xxx, yyy and zzz. In practice you only need to specify xxx here, since the rest of the packages will be pulled because of the dependency system. To save space in your image you could schedule the packages yyy and zzz for deletion after the phase ppp is over by listing them in the 'delete' section.