Hi, this is relevant for everyone concerned about development of installers for Debian Hurd systems.
It indicates that something akin cross-install will become the default, rather than the tar file method. I think the next thing I'll do in this area is to "port" debootstrap to the Hurd. It's not really cross, as it uses the dpkg --unpack feature, but as I want to have native Hurd installs, and it is trivial to replace dpkg with dpkg-hurd, this is of secondary importance (and maybe, someday dpkg will get the --do-not-run-any-packages-scripts option which lack of makes dpkg-hurd necessary). ----- Forwarded message from Ethan Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- Envelope-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Delivery-date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 14:09:19 +0200 X-Envelope-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Ethan Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Subject: Re: Still no base tarball Mail-Followup-To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] X-OS: Debian GNU Mail-Copies-To: nobody Resent-Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Resent-From: [email protected] X-Mailing-List: <[email protected]> archive/latest/94671 Resent-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-UIDL: ("[EMAIL PROTECTED]"!j>L!!2)h!! Resent-Bcc: Resent-Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 14:09:18 +0200 On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 10:53:54AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote: > > "Just the fax mam." > > I have been trying to gain the information you just provided from our very > first interaction. You have objected to doing technical support for the > inatllation item many of our new installs will need. When I continued > having problems obtaining necessary information, it seemed reasonable to > ask a wider audience. fine since aj won't explain it i will. base tarballs are obsolete and deprecated, period. the ONLY time a base tarball should be used to install the base system is for hard disk based installs. it should never be used for CD installs, or network installs, ever. for CD installs and network installs debootstrap simply uses the normal debian archive, that is the .debs found in the pool and the apt Packages/Release files in dists/woody/binary-* for CDs all necessary packages will be on CD1, for the network everything is there obviously. so the basedebs.tgz file should NOT be present on offcial Debian CDs, nor should it be used for CD based installs. dbootstrap or debootstrap will never download the basedebs.tgz file from the network, if you have network connectivity the real debian archive will be used, NOT a base tarball. that leaves hard disk installs (installing from files on a FAT or HFS partition) generally its unlikly that the user will have a debian mirror on their harddisk, since its basically impossible given the crippled nature of those filesystems. in those cases they will download a basedebs.tgz (from where has yet to be determined), drivers.tgz and other b-f files manually with whatever downloading software comes with the proprietary OS in use. when they select a hard disk based install method dbootstrap will first see there is no debian mirror, then it will check for a basedebs.tgz in whatever directory the user specified (that is if they specify /debian, dbootstrap will check for /debian/basedebs.tgz). reasons a hard disk install might be desired are: * lack of CDs * lack of CDROM * lack of decent network connection (read the connection requires junk like ppp or pppoe) futhermore basedebs.tgz does not contain a root filesystem, all it contains is /var/cache/apt/archives (with all the .debs that make up the base system) and /var/lib/apt/lists (with the Packages files). -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
