From debian-installer/retriever/choose-mirror-TODO:
] * What about picking the distribution to use? Seems silly to have that on
] the final installer, but before release it needs to know to use
] unstable/frozen rather than stable. Maybe a really low-priority question?
That's not actually that bad a question to have in the released dist.
It'll be easy to make a file a la dists/potato/Release for each available
distribution, and it should be relatively easy to go from that to having
a useful dialog like:
The following suites are available:
[ Debian 2.2r2 (potato) ]
woody
sid
Different suites have different policies wrt how well tested they
are, and so forth.
Debian 2.2r2 (potato)
Status: stable
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r2
This is the second revision of release 2.2. of the Debian GNU/Linux
distribution and the accompanying non-free and contrib components.
...
woody
Status: testing
Description: Debian GNU/Linux -- unreleased
This is the next release candidate for the Debian GNU/Linux
distribution. ...
This can be automatically generated by retrieving
http://<mirror>/debian/dists/*/Release
and appropriate apt lines and component questions and what not can
presumably be generated based on that.
In general, you probably want to be able to select up to three mirrors:
one for main/contrib/non-free, one for non-US/*, and one for security
updates. If you're installing from CD, you may well want to use the CD
for main, a mirror for contrib/non-free/non-US/*, and security.d.o for
the security updates.
The dists/*/Release file will also contain md5sums of all the indices
in the distribution (in a form compatible with conectiva's apt, so
hopefully soon with debian's apt too), so the installer may be able to
do some self-verification based on that too.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Thanks to all avid pokers out there''
-- linux.conf.au, 17-20 January 2001
PGP signature
