Switch to alpine for "immutable" os

[DavyLandman]

It might be a nice idea to switch to Alpine.

The best property of alpine that could be interesting for epidose:

• the diskless mode is a mode where the os essentially boots from a ram disk, and all changes happening during runtime are discarded at a reboot (plus no sd-card wear+tear). This looks a lot like a live-cd, with the exception that you can commit the current changes.
• minimal distro, only the kernel, bootloader (and for rpi a few supporting services) are needed to running a full os
• versioned releases that are tracking upstream quite nicely.

At home I've been using it for all kinds of IoT purposes, if you set it up once, there is no bitrot than can happen to your OS that a reboot cannot solve.

The only current problem is that on some rpi's the boot time is roughly a minute.

[dspinellis]

Indeed, this seems like a good suggestion for the setup.

Do you know if the required packages (ibbluetooth-dev libglib2.0-dev python3-dev python3-setuptools shellcheck sqlite3 virtualenv dh-virtualenv debhelper supervisor) are available on it? Also, currently the system configuration is managed through a Puppet client. Do you think this would work on Alpine? An finally, I assume that the database where the contacts are stored will survive across reboots, right?

[DavyLandman]

I'll check tonight for the dependencies. But you can have a different partition that contains the persistent data with the db.