I applaud his idea. Like him, I install debian from a pile of diskettes. And I cannot FTP a large debian file because I am only allocated a limited disk space on my SLIP provider.
On Mon, 23 Oct 1995, Steve Preston wrote: > I will be installing debian linux in a couple weeks (when I get a new > hard disk) on a machine at home. I have installed slackware linux > several times in the past. > > I prefer to use floppies to transfer the .deb files. > > I have been writing a program to efficiently copy the .deb files to > floppies (ie. copy the files using the fewest number of floppies). > > My hope was to be able to install the packages from the floppies. It > is my intention to make a package, in case others might find it > useful. > > In order to be maximally useful, I thought it best to write dos file > system floppies. > > The first problem I had was how to handle .deb files larger than a > single floppy can hold. Of course you could use 'tar -M' to write to > multiple floppies, but this shuts out people who don't have a linux > machine to write floppies, and it does not result in a dos file system > disk. > > The next problem I came up against is the 8+3 dos limit on filenames. > So I wrote an algorithm to generate unique dos names. The program > even writes a 'rename' script onto the floppies which will rename the > files to their original names. > > The problem with this last is that the .deb files must be copied to > your hard disk (in a linux file system) in order to have their full > name. So this destroys the objective for installing the packages > directly from the floppies. I guess I could live with this, however. > > Ooh! It just hit me. A better solution would be to create symbolic > links to the files on the floppy. > > Anyway, I have a few questions. > > 1) Would it be useful to many people to be able to install packages > from DOS diskettes? (I vote yes on this) > > 2a) How hard would it be to make dpkg work with packages that have been > split across multiple diskettes? > > 2b) Or would it make sense to require large logical packages, like say, > emacs, to be split into smaller physical packages, like say, emacs-1, > emacs-2, etc., and just have the (sub)packages depend on each other? > > -- > Steve Preston ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) > >
