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Roadmap & Open Points

Working notes, last reviewed June 2026. These items come from development sessions and are not yet scheduled.

Current Status​

  • ✅ Remastering working on all six families: Alpine, Arch, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, openSUSE (and derivatives).
  • ✅ Graphical installer: Calamares (Alpine included).
  • ✅ TUI installer: Krill, rewritten in Go with Bubbletea — installs for real, verified in VM on both BIOS and UEFI (June 2026). Interactive wizard plus --unattended mode for headless installs. See installer.md for the implemented architecture.
  • ✅ Clone with user data (--clone).
  • ✅ Encrypted clone (--crypted).

Open Points​

1. Krill — remaining refinements​

The rewrite is done (coa/pkg/sysinstall/krill + coa/pkg/sysinstall/krill/engine); what remains:

  • Automatic dispatcher: coa sysinstall without subcommand should detect the environment (display server + calamares binary) and pick the GUI or the TUI by itself, as per the original design.
  • btrfs subvolumes: the engine currently mounts btrfs flat; the @/@home/@cache/@log layout described in mount.conf is not applied yet.
  • TUI polish: the static-address fields arrive prefilled and cursor editing can be confusing — add a quick clear (ctrl+u) or select-all-on-focus. The Welcome screen wording "version oa-tools vX" is ambiguous (it is the oa-tools version, not the OS one).
  • displaymanager autologin covers lightdm/sddm/gdm; other DMs are silently skipped.

2. Multi-architecture detection​

The Arch field in distro uses runtime.GOARCH; it should use uname -m before the multi-arch porting:

func detectArch() string {
    out, err := exec.Command("uname", "-m").Output()
    if err != nil {
        return runtime.GOARCH // fallback
    }
    arch := strings.TrimSpace(string(out))
    switch arch {
    case "x86_64":  return "amd64"
    case "aarch64": return "arm64"
    case "riscv64": return "riscv64"
    default:        return arch
    }
}

To be integrated in NewDistro() before the arm64/riscv64 ports.

3. Hardcoded work_dir in the templates​

/home/eggs appears literally in the shell commands of base.yaml.tmpl. If the user changes settings.remaster.work_dir, the shell commands do not respect it. Solution: pass it as a template variable inside the shell commands too:

command: "/etc/oa-tools.d/scripts/copy-kernel-initrd.sh {{ .settings.remaster.work_dir }}"

4. generate-efi.img as a dedicated module​

The inline step with dd + mkfs.vfat + mmd + mcopy is fragile. Candidate for a dedicated efi_image module with structured error handling.

5. Cleanup/rollback on error​

The cleanup step is commented out in the YAML. If the pipeline fails midway, mounts are left hanging. Evaluate an automatic rollback mechanism in coa.

Test Hardware​

ArchHardwareNotes
amd64Main Proxmox hostCI VMs, self-hosted runner
arm64Raspberry Pi 5 with ProxmoxARM64 VMs, already operational
riscv64SpaceMit MuseBook M1Bianbu OS (Ubuntu derivative), already remastered with eggs

Visibility / Community​

  • Problem: oa-tools has few stars despite its quality — penguins-eggs still captures all the traffic.
  • Plan: wait for Debian/Ubuntu feature parity, then a technical blog post + HackerNews ("I rewrote my remastering tool in C+Go, here's why").
  • The penguins-eggs README already mentions oa-tools as the successor — strengthen that link.