On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:52 AM, Frederick Grose <fgrose@gmail.com> wrote:

The --skipcopy option in livecd-iso-to-disk was implemented to aid testing and boot configuration file recovery (see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.livecd/2682).

Here is the original rationale for --skipcopy:

On 10/29/08 6:18 PM, Stewart Adam wrote:

> * Adds --skipcopy to skip copying the live OS

Oops, forgot to mention two things. I know this feature seems a little odd, so I wanted to explain a bit more... --skipcopy doesn't skip all copying, just the live OS, which makes it useful for testing the boot configuration. It's also useful for USB media, where testing over and over would normally be wasting limited write cycles; it takes a lot of waiting for the 700-MB file copy to finish. ALso, say the MBR gets lost or you've transferred the live OS files from a friend's key, you can just refresh the MBR and bootloader config instead without touching the live OS and persistent home.

I've filed a bug, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=582051,
containing patches for the livecd-iso-to-disk.sh and .pod files.

I've found that it will overwrite both an existing persistent overlay and

home.img, if they exist. This is unintentional destructive behavior.

While it may seem that one wouldn't ask for a new overlay or home folder

AND skipcopy, during the testing of scripts, this is a reasonable scenario.

This is a piece of a project to enhance the livecd-iso-to-disk script for

the Sugar on a Stick customization kit project,

and it has the general benefit of making testing of the script easier during development.

--Fred