You have a machine someplace, probably in The Cloud, and it has Linux installed, but not to your liking. You want to do a clean reinstall, maybe switching the distribution, or getting rid of the cruft. But this requires running an installer, and it's too difficult to run d-i on remote machines.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could point a program at that machine and have it do a reinstall, on the fly, while the machine was running?

This is what I've now taught propellor to do! Here's a working configuration which will make propellor convert a system running Fedora (or probably many other Linux distros) to Debian:

testvm :: Host testvm = host "testvm.kitenet.net" & os ( System ( Debian Unstable ) "amd64" ) & OS . cleanInstallOnce ( OS . Confirmed "testvm.kitenet.net" ) `onChange` propertyList "fixing up after clean install" [ User . shadowConfig True , OS . preserveRootSshAuthorized , OS . preserveResolvConf , Apt . update , Grub . boots "/dev/sda" `requires` Grub . installed Grub . PC ] & Hostname . sane & Hostname . searchDomain & Apt . installed [ "linux-image-amd64" ] & Apt . installed [ "ssh" ] & User . hasSomePassword "root"

And here's a video of it in action.

It was surprisingly easy to build this. Propellor already knew how to create a chroot, so from there it basically just has to move files around until the chroot takes over from the old OS.

After the cleanInstallOnce property does its thing, propellor is running inside a freshly debootstrapped Debian system. Then we just need a few more Propertites to get from there to a bootable, usable system: Install grub and the kernel, turn on shadow passwords, preserve a few config files from the old OS, etc.

It's really astounding to me how much easier this was to build than it was to build d-i. It took years to get d-i to the point of being able to install a working system. It took me a few part days to add this capability to propellor (It's 200 lines of code), and I've probably spent a total of less than 30 days total developing propellor in its entirity.

So, what gives? Why is this so much easier? There are a lot of reasons:

Technology is so much better now. I can spin up cloud VMs for testing in seconds; I use VirtualBox to restore a system from a snapshot. So testing is much much easier. The first work on d-i was done by booting real machines, and for a while I was booting them using floppies.

Propellor doesn't have a user interface. The best part of d-i is preseeding, but that was mostly an accident; when I started developing d-i the first thing I wrote was main-menu (which is invisible 99.9% of the time) and we had to develop cdebconf, and tons of other UI. Probably 90% of d-i work involves the UI. Jettisoning the UI entirely thus speeds up development enormously. And propellor's configuration file blows d-i preseeding out of the water in expressiveness and flexability.

Propellor has a much more principled design and implementation. Separating things into Properties, which are composable and reusable gives enormous leverage. Strong type checking and a powerful programming language make it much easier to develop than d-i's mess of shell scripts calling underpowered busybox commands etc. Properties often Just Work the first time they're tested.

No separate runtime. d-i runs in its own environment, which is really a little custom linux distribution. Developing linux distributions is hard. Propellor drops into a live system and runs there. So I don't need to worry about booting up the system, getting it on the network, etc etc. This probably removes another order of magnitude of complexity from propellor as compared with d-i.

This seems like the opposite of the Second System effect to me. So perhaps d-i was the second system all along?

I don't know if I'm going to take this all the way to propellor is d-i 2.0. But in theory, all that's needed now is:

Teaching propellor how to build a bootable image, containing a live Debian system and propellor. (Yes, this would mean reimplementing debian-live, but I estimate 100 lines of code to do it in propellor; most of the Properties needed already exist.) That image would then be booted up and perform the installation.

Some kind of UI that generates the propellor config file.

Adding Properties to partition the disk.

cleanInstallOnce and associated Properties will be included in propellor's upcoming 1.1.0 release, and are available in git now.

Oh BTW, you could parameterize a few Properties by OS, and Propellor could be used to install not just Debian or Ubuntu, but whatever Linux distribution you want. Patches welcomed...