> > > Another question, for the mid-long term, do you think that it would be > > > possible to use the Debian Installer directly ?
> > We're already using debootstrap, as ec2debian-build-ami did. I'm curious > > how you'd want debian-installer to work, but if it supports arbitrary image > > files as target, someone might be able to do it. > As far as I understand the debian installer actually uses debootstrap > (seeing that debootstrap has a --debian-installer switch and all...), > debian-build-cloud is simply a different wrapper, though I believe the real > installer does a lot of other stuff as well. Hi all, first, let me thank Anders again for his work on debian-build-cloud (ex-ec2debian-build-ami), that gave us the momentum which is essential to get started. One almost tautological advantage of using Debian-Installer is that the resulting system will be the same as any other Debian system installed following the instructions on the Debian website. Debian-Installer (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/) is the default way to install Debian on a machine. It is very flexible, and its "preseed" (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed) system allows us to make unattended custom installations reproducibly with a simple text configuration file. Debian Installer comes with a large and extensible collection of components to select mirrors and locales, boot systems and kernels, install platform-specific packages, configure the network, etc. It also has multiple hooks to run custom scripts, and has a quite good developer guide (http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/doc/internals/). The base system is installed via debootstrap. Therefore, in a way, debian-build-cloud re-implements Debian-Installer for the tasks external to debootstrap. This means that we cut ourselves from advances made on installing Debian in general, and also some potential contributions will be harder to share. One of the largest difference is that Debian-Installer is booted as an operating system, and debian-build-cloud is executed as a program from a running system. In the case of preparing cloud images, the impact of this difference is reduced. On the Amazon cloud for instance, I prepared machine images of the Debian installer. When booted and provided a preseed file, they install a Debian system on a target volume. What blocks me from producing a usable image is that Debian-Installer does not seem to support making partition-less systems (and maybe it is not even a problem if it is possible to boot partitionned volumes on the Amazon cloud). Once this is solved, I think that we should seriously consider using Debian-Installer. In summary, using Debian-Installer, we will ensure that Debian Cloud images are the closest to any other Debian system, and will avoid parallel implementations of similar functionalities to turn a debootstrapped chroot into a real operating system. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
