The mkosi OS generation tool

Last week Lennart Poettering introduced casync, a tool for distributing system images. This week he introduces mkosi, a tool for making OS images. "mkosi is definitely a tool with a focus on developer's needs for building OS images, for testing and debugging, but also for generating production images with cryptographic protection. A typical use-case would be to add a mkosi.default file to an existing project (for example, one written in C or Python), and thus making it easy to generate an OS image for it. mkosi will put together the image with development headers and tools, compile your code in it, run your test suite, then throw away the image again, and build a new one, this time without development headers and tools, and install your build artifacts in it. This final image is then "production-ready", and only contains your built program and the minimal set of packages you configured otherwise. Such an image could then be deployed with casync (or any other tool of course) to be delivered to your set of servers, or IoT devices or whatever you are building."

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