plymouth for unattended OS installers

[Jonathan Matthew]

Hi,

Over the last few days I've been hooking plymouth into a
buildroot/uclibc based linux system that we use to reinstall client
machines over the network. We use plymouth to hide the terminal output
from sfdisk, mkfs, ctorrent, ntfsclone, etc. and show a simple
progress bar to give users some idea of how long they'll have to wait.

Most of the changes I've made are in a custom splash plugin and theme
I put together, and in patches to the tools we use for the install to
make them report progress using the plymouth client library. Aside
from that there are a few changes to plymouth itself:

- uclibc doesn't have rpmatch and doesn't support the 'a' modifier for
strings in *scanf. I just hacked around these, and I'm probably not
sufficiently motivated to add the missing features to uclibc.
- I didn't want to build gtk or drm, so I made them both optional (I
notice drm was made optional after 0.8.3, but that's what we're using)
and used the framebuffer renderer instead.
- ply-image.c uses a deprecated libpng function
(png_set_gray_1_2_4_to_8) that appears to have a replacement
(png_set_expand_gray_1_2_4_to_8)
- I added a non-blocking variant of
ply_event_loop_process_pending_events, not sure if this is actually
necessary though
- since we don't want to allow user input during the install, I
disabled all the keyboard and unbuffered input code.

If any of this would be accepted into plymouth, I'm happy to get my
patches into shape and submit them, but otherwise I'm equally happy to
maintain them myself.

thanks,
-jonathan