Adding new distributions

Merging support for a new distribution in mkosi depends on a few factors. Not all of these are required but depending on how many of these requirements are satisfied, the chances of us merging support for your distribution will improve:

1. Is the distribution somewhat popular? mkosi’s goal is not to support every distribution under the sun, the distribution should have a substantial amount of users.
2. Does the distribution differentiate itself somehow from the distributions that are already supported? We’re generally not interested in supporting distributions that only consist of minimal configuration changes to another distribution.
3. Is there a long-term maintainer for the distribution in mkosi? When proposing support for a new distribution, we expect you to be the maintainer for the distribution and to respond when pinged for support on distribution specific issues.
4. Does the distribution use a custom package manager or one of the already supported ones (apt, dnf, pacman, zypper)? Supporting new package managers in mkosi is generally a lot of work. We can support new ones if needed for a new distribution, but we will insist on the package manager having a somewhat sane design, with official support for building in a chroot and running unprivileged in a user namespace being the bare minimum features we expect from any new package manager.

We will only consider new distributions that satisfy all or most of these requirements. However, you can still use mkosi with the distribution by setting the Distribution setting to custom and implementing either providing the rootfs via a skeleton tree or base tree, or by providing the rootfs via a prepare script.

Implementing new distributions

To actually implement a new distribution, the following checklist can be used:

• Add the distribution to the Distribution enum
• Add the implementation of the distribution in mkosi/distributions. If the distribution is a variant of an existing distribution, inherit from the existing distribution’s installer class and only override the necessary methods.
• Update any relevant methods on the Distribution enum to take the new distribution into account.
• Update the documentation in mkosi/resources/man/mkosi.1.md
• Update the default initrd, tools and default image configurations in mkosi/resources/mkosi-initrd, mkosi/resources/mkosi-tools and mkosi.conf.d respectively. If the distribution is a variant of another existing distribution, update the [Match] blocks for the existing distribution to also match against the new distribution. To test whether all necessary changes were made, you can run mkosi -d <distribution> --tools-tree -t disk -f qemu.