On Sat, 2022-11-05 at 20:20 +0100, Patrice Duroux wrote:
> There are many projects here and there (Termux, AnLinux, etc.) that are based
> on
> some sorts of kernel-free images of a minimal Debian system to be used through
> chroot (other Linux) or PRoot (Android) or whatever environments.
Some examples of those linked from this page:
https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid
> Is there something already available at Debian?
Most Debian users are currently expected to create their own installs,
using either the official Debian installer or the tools it is based on
like debootstrap. One of the reasons for this is that packages often do
system-specific configuration in their maintainer scripts (like the
systemd machine identifier or OpenSSH creating private keys), so you
can't always expect an install to be able to be duplicated safely.
There are folks working on reproducible installs though.
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleInstalls
There have been five types of pre-installed systems available from the
Debian community; live images, cloud images, RPi images, minimal docker
containers, and the WSL install. The first three of those are partition
images, but the WSL installer is basically a kernel-free rootfs tarball
wrapped in a PE executable and the docker containers are similarish.
All of these have to work around the issue mentioned above.
https://www.debian.org/CD/live/
https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/
https://raspi.debian.net/
https://docker.debian.net/
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Microsoft/Windows/SubsystemForLinux
> Something interesting to develop?
There are lots of potential artefacts Debian could create from our
binaries rather than expecting all users to install their systems.
There are lots of different types of installs being explored outside of
Debian, including system snapshots, server containers, app containers,
appliance images, chroots/VMs under other operating systems etc.
Debian could potentially be converting our binary packages to each of
these different types of installs.
Debian users could then be directed by default to the most appropriate
install type for their use-case.
PS: a list of system/package build tools is here:
https://wiki.debian.org/SystemBuildTools
PS: a recent article about some new image based installs:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/912774/b95d0bf96ebb67ab/
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
