Using GNOME OS as simulator images
My goal for this issue is to have a place to keep track of what it would take to be able to use GNOME OS images as the simulator OS for GNOME Builder.
Ideally we'd be able to run the application within a simulator in Builder using GNOME OS as the base image meaning we get testing against unreleased GNOME releases sooner during development. Additionally, it would mean that we could have a platform to develop some of the components for the new platform without perturbing our host operating system with all the convenience of Builder.
So, assuming we all agree that would be a good thing, it makes sense to talk about some of the issues that crop up as part of that.
- How do we install GNOME OS in an automated fashion
- How do we keep it up to date
- How do we push applications into GNOME OS
Transfering Applications
One thing I'd like to investigate is if we can have virtiofs installed in GNOME OS so that we can push Flatpak (or other) builds into the VM without having to package/transfer them. If we at least had an OSTree repository commit, we could access the same repository from the peer in a read-only fashion.
This would need virtiofs added to the GNOME OS kernel.
How do we keep it up to date
If we have something like deviced
(now built on GNOME OS) we can potentially add hooks to be able to do remote upgrades of the operating system. Currently, however, this requires being run as a user which has interactive requirements.
It would be really nice if we could control the OSTree deployment from the host (using virtiofs as well) but that may mean doing something special virtiofs-wise from kernel command-line.
If so, we could use this for the initial install too.