libXcomposite.so.1 missing

The past couple of days we've been running into spins that were unable to start the graphical installer. As it seems, gtk2 has had an update released recently which required libXcomposite, which is causing this behavior. Including the gtk2 update into the package set on the newly composed installation media thus fails if you start the graphical installer.

Let me try and explain what happens when you compose installation media. Anaconda-runtime (/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/upd-instroot to be precise) has a list of packages to "install" onto a loop-mounted SquashFS file system image. The upd-instroot uses yum to install these packages onto that file system but also cleans out what is left behind on that image. So not only do you need to pull in libXcomposite into the list of packages being installed, you also need to adjust the list that scrubs the (what is to become) stage2.img contents. Here's where it all went wrong, libXcomposite.so.1 was being installed, but was removed also.

What this means, is...

From this moment onwards, at least as far as Fedora 8 is concerned, no-one will be able to Re-Spin or Re-Mix or Re-Whatever, unless you include set of updated anaconda packages on the host system performing the compose as well as in the package set on the media. Now, it just so happens that anaconda is not updated during a releases life-cycle (this policy has been in place for quite a while), and thus... You can forget about composing Fedora 8 media that boots the graphical installer if you include the updates repository.

Although...

You could of course exclude the gtk2 package from the updates repository, like so (this is from /etc/revisor/conf.d/revisor-f8-i386-respin.conf, soon to become available via the Revisor source tree but right now on http://git.kanarip.com/?p=unityspin/.git;a=tree;f=conf):

[updates]
name=Fedora 8 - i386 - Updates
baseurl=http://localrepo/fedora/updates/8/i386/
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f8&arch=i386
exclude=gtk2
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

Or, you can do the following...

I Am Fedora For A Reason

The good thing about Linux in general is that you can fiddle with any code, no matter how good you understand it and no matter how good you are in breaking stuff. So, I've dug through the anaconda code once more (previously I backported a fix from anaconda development concerning the i586 not booting issue), found the issue, logged a bug, and came up with a patch, which I've applied and build and composed media with that successfully started the graphical installer. Note that the packages I've build also include the fix for the i586 issue. I've also dropped the anaconda-not-being-updated for a Fedora release into the hands of anaconda upstream, via their mailing list, and notified our other users and developers.