Last night I opened a draft merge request to open up #postmarketOS #pmbootstrap's flashing interface to more use-cases by adding a new "flash" subcommand that takes a path to any arbitrary file and the name of the partition to flash. It works like the existing flashing subcommands, i.e. no need to install and set up any flashing tools on your host—especially useful if your OS does not provide easy access to up-to-date device flashing tools.

Testing and feedback welcome: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/-/merge_requests/2906

Tagged #postmarketOS #pmbootstrap 3.10.0 last night. Highlights include the install command prompting for user password and "pmOS is already installed on this medium" much earlier so you don't have to babysit it, run0 support if sudo and doas aren't installed, and UEFI boot by default for QEMU.

Other than that, lots of smaller bug fixes and enhancements as well as technical debt being cleaned up. Big thanks to all the new contributors who showed up to help out with this!

I've been bugged by some of the #postmarketOS #pmbootstrap subcommand names for a while, so I decided to finally write my thoughts down in an issue: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/-/work_items/2745

Any thoughts or suggestions are more than welcome. Hearing others' experiences and thoughts about this would be great.

Does anyone have an actual use-case for the "pmbootstrap apkindex_parse" subcommand? Asking because apparently it was broken for over a year and no one seemed to complain 😅

#pmbootstrap #postmarketOS

I just opened a merge request to #postmarketOS #pmbootstrap making some changes to the UX of the install subcommand, in particular prompting you about install disk issues much earlier and also informing about that without the --password argument you'll be prompted to manually enter it later.

Testing and feedback would be much appreciated, especially if you are using less common arguments to the install subcommand as the early mounting potentially could cause issues.

https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/-/merge_requests/2863

If you're interested in beginner-friendly tasks for contributing to #postmarketOS in #Python, #pmbootstrap has some clean-ups that need to be done—in particular, migrating the remaining commands from the legacy frontend.py to the new "commands" module.

See https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/-/commit/7df1ab11218dfbf4797dfb3ef896f3a060749549 for an example. Essentially, each command should have its own .py file and take a list of arguments instead of the whole "args" namespace.

Had a stab at making #postmarketOS #pmbootstrap able to automatically update the checksum of all packages with unstaged and uncomitted changes. Incredibly satisfying to not have to awkwardly script this or manually copy git output!

MR is up if you want to try it out yourself: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/-/merge_requests/2807

How to add a custom UI option locally for pmbootstrap for that instance of pmbootstrap only?

#linux #mobile #postmarketos #pmbootstrap #mobilelinux