Recompressing the whole system

The larch-live package provides the 'larch-rebuild' script, which regenerates the system archives 'system.sqf' and 'mods.sqf' from the state of the system at the last session save (i.e. from the files on the boot medium). All the changes which have been gathered in the overlay archive are merged into the new 'system.sqf', thus (potentially) reducing the space requirements considerably. The directory for the storage of these new archives must be passed as argument to the script.

No further handling of these new archives is provided with larch at present, for the simple reason that it is difficult to find a general solution to the question of what to do with them. They cannot just replace the archives on the boot medium because these are required to keep the live system running. So some temporary storage is needed for them, and it is quite conceivable that there is not enough space on the medium (as that might well be the reason for wanting to recompress the system in the first place).

Thus some details of how to implement this rebuild feature are currently left to the creativity of the user. I would, however suggest that the medium file 'larch/boot-init' (see boot-init) might be a useful place to perform the replacement of the archives. You would just have to write a script using 'larch-rebuild' to save the new archives somewhere, and write this 'boot-init' script to replace the old ones with the new ones, remembering to also delete any sqf files ending in '_' and '~' and the 'overlay.tar.lzo' archive.

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