Re: Supporting compression-less release builds

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2025 at 12:34:14PM +1100, Simon Burge wrote:
> If you don't want the compressed sets in your development cycle can you
> just use "./build.sh ... distribution" to skip generating the sets?

This likely will not do as the image creation needs the set files.

> A better control knob for sets wouldn't be unwelcome (IMO) :).

Yes, especially an override for the compression level, so a simple solution
would be USE_XZ_SETS=no GZIP_LEVEL=0 or something like that (where GZIP_LEVEL
does not exist yet).

Making this all slightly more generic sounds good too, but it is pretty
intrusive - the file name is used in the release docs as well as in sysinst,
and external tools like Anita depend on a hard code list of potential file
names for the sets.

> Note that we sometimes use an explicit compression method elsewhere
> in the build (eg compressing kernels) that might differ from the
> compression method for sets.

Indeed, and also some of the compression levels must be high (or used to
be, maybe the split of DVD images fixed this properly already) to make
the resulting images fit into certain size restraints.

For the original problem, I would do something else: hack the makefiles
localy to not update the compressed aritfacts at all when some make variable
is set. If that turns out to be usefull and not totally awful, it could
even be commited with some warnings in the documentation.

Martin