On Dec 7, 2005, at 12:27 PM, Hans Ekbrand wrote:
So, yeah, I'd say it doesn't provide a clear description.
Here a draft on the possiblities involved. If my understanding of the
issues are correct, the installation manual needs some extensive
rewriting.
There are three different stages A, B and C, that can be loaded by
different means:
A. How to *start* the debian-installer?
1. Boot from removable media that has an installer-image on its boot
block (e.g. CDROM, floppy, usb)
2. Use a bootloader from within a existing operating system (yaboot,
BootX, penguin)
2b. (possible, but not very common) Use a native bootloader (yaboot,
grub, lilo) installed on harddisk)
3. Netboot (pxe or other methods gets a bootloader by dhcp and tftp)
(pxelinux or yaboot loads (by tftp) the kernel and initrd needed)
B. From where is the debian-installer to get its *own modules*
(needed for its own functioning)?
1. From the removable media (CDROM or usb) that started the debian-
installer at boot
2. From .iso-file on local harddisk (Filesystem must be readable by
the debian-installer, which exludes HFS+)
3. From the net (internet or local debian-mirror)
Oh, I get that all right. Where you lose me is the rationale for
the bootstrap/installer being incomplete in the first place. What's
preventing the a complete set of debian-installer modules from
residing on the ram-disk--as it did with the woody installer?
I'd like to know the rationale for why HFS+ is not supported by the
installer--especially as the kernel is specifically compiled for
systems that are likely to have only HFS+ filesystems. What's so
difficult about building powerpc installer kernels with
CONFIG_HFSPLUS_FS ?
Supposing that there is a compelling reason for an incomplete
installer: In such cases the installer should _always_ provide a
route to B.3. Instead the etch hd-media installer insists on _ONLY_
B.2 while not bothering to support the only FS likely to be available.
In short there are three perfectly reasonable ways to resolve the
situation:
1. A complete ram-disk -- everything loaded by the bootstrap from
whatever source is selected in A.
2. Kernel supports whatever filesystem is likely to be present on
the bootstrap source (including HFS+)
3. Installer is _always_ provides a path for fetching module from
the network.
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