From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030425 Description of problem: Use of the %pre directive is poorly documented, especially with regard to how it interacts with the rest of the install process. The %include directive in more recent versions of anaconda fixes this shortcoming, but it doesn't really help when working with the current version of AS. Specifically, documenting how a %pre script can (if it can) modify the kickstart file. An example would be determining the hardware type (with dmidecode), and loading the appropriate driver (such as a scsi controller driver that was unsupported when AS 2.1 initially shipped). Thanks. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Search for %pre information in places such as the mailing list, google, etc. 2. Find hardly anything. Additional info:
You can't do this in 2.1 (it's why the %include directive was added). Assigning to Tammy to double-check what's currently there for the next release.
The latest step of docs for kickstart show how to use the %pre section to determine information and then include it later in the kickstart file. Like Jeremy said, the %include directive was added after RHEL 2.1. Is this the type of example you are looking for?
In the kickstart-mailing list there have been reports of regenerating an entire kickstart file in the %pre section, and writing it to /tmp/ks.cfg so that the new version will be reread after %pre. grep'ing through /usr/lib/anaconda does not find that string, but I did find /tmp/anaconda-ks.cfg. So I tried writing to both of these locations in %pre but without success. Is regenerating the entire kickstart file in %pre possible in AS 2.1? Thanks.
The next version will include %include, and the next version of the docs will include an example of how to use %pre to create a file and include it with %include.