Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 12:39:06AM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: - dak needs to stop unaccepting new udebs. This should be fixed now, anyway. - a bunch of full-sized udebs needs to be created (more on this below) That's such a contradiction in terms, btw :) Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/ I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.'' -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 02:36:33 +1000 Anthony Towns [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What's going to go on the rootfs? Presumably something like: libc6, busybox-udeb, ash-udeb udpkg, cdebconf, anna *-retriever and any dependencies they have /lib/modules/kernel/** It could be something that reads multiple floppies, or takes things from CD-ROM, for NFS-root (it would be difficult to ask questions) The floppy is too small a place for putting in i18n locale info, and debian-installer, and I think this was the initial intention of d-i being modular. regards, junichi -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 18:28:12 +0900 Junichi Uekawa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 02:36:33 +1000 Anthony Towns [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What's going to go on the rootfs? Presumably something like: libc6, busybox-udeb, ash-udeb udpkg, cdebconf, anna *-retriever and any dependencies they have /lib/modules/kernel/** It could be something that reads multiple floppies, or takes things from CD-ROM, for NFS-root (it would be difficult to ask questions) The floppy is too small a place for putting in i18n locale info, and debian-installer, and I think this was the initial intention of d-i being modular. I think the golden rule for bootstraping the installer is that it must be automated and as idiot proof as possible, anything that could require user interaction should be done once the installer starts. Glenn msg21609/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 06:28:12PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote: On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 02:36:33 +1000 Anthony Towns [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What's going to go on the rootfs? Presumably something like: libc6, busybox-udeb, ash-udeb udpkg, cdebconf, anna *-retriever and any dependencies they have /lib/modules/kernel/** The floppy is too small a place for putting in i18n locale info, and debian-installer, and I think this was the initial intention of d-i being modular. Do we need the i18n locale info in the rootfs though? All you need is enough i18n so you can prompt for which retriever to use, and to configure it, no? In the normal case, you're installing from a CD, so we can figure out some way of automating that entirely -- did we boot from a cd? yes? then use cdrom-retriever, install libc6 etc, then start prompting for real -- in which case we don't have to worry about floppy sizes. And in the next most common case, you just need to be able to enter a URL in your preferred language, which is pretty straightforward. In any event, there's no better way to do this -- you need some way of prompting the user to insert the next disk in their local language, and if you can't manage that for a 3k -retriever, you're not going to be able to manage it at all, afaict. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/ I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.'' msg21610/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 06:28:12PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote: On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 02:36:33 +1000 Anthony Towns [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What's going to go on the rootfs? Presumably something like: libc6, busybox-udeb, ash-udeb udpkg, cdebconf, anna *-retriever and any dependencies they have /lib/modules/kernel/** It could be something that reads multiple floppies, or takes things from CD-ROM, for NFS-root (it would be difficult to ask questions) The floppy is too small a place for putting in i18n locale info, and debian-installer, and I think this was the initial intention of d-i being modular. Slightly OT: IMHO, this could have a place in supporting older systems. I think we should support older systems, and that's the reason we should continue to support floppy installs. But I think it's not unreasonable to support older systems less fully than we need to support modern ones. So, for modern systems assume a CD, just like all other OSs now do. And for older ones provide a more limited installer that works on a floppy. I even think that the more limited installer could be translated individually as a separate entity, and different language versions of it provided, rather than making it multilingual as a package. It should become a fixed endpoint which supports only those older architectures, only on floppy; and no further changes will be required of it. For powerpc, there is a clear demarcation point: OldWorld Mac and prep are 'older'. -- *--v- Installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 v--* | http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual | |debian-imac: http://debian-imac.sourceforge.net | |Chris Tillman[EMAIL PROTECTED] | | To Have, Give All to All (ACIM) | ** -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 12:39:06AM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
- - prebaseconfig needs to stop using grub directly and depend on
{grub,lilo}-installer instead.
Uhm. Shouldn't it depend on something like boot-installer, which would
be provided by all boot loaders installer packages? Alpha doesn't use
neither grub, nor lilo, but aboot or milo. Isn't Provides: bootable-system
just for that?
--
Regards, Wartan.
Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
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Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
* Wartan Hachaturow
| On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 12:39:06AM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
|
| - - prebaseconfig needs to stop using grub directly and depend on
|{grub,lilo}-installer instead.
|
| Uhm. Shouldn't it depend on something like boot-installer, which would
| be provided by all boot loaders installer packages? Alpha doesn't use
| neither grub, nor lilo, but aboot or milo. Isn't Provides: bootable-system
| just for that?
It is -- sorry about being a bit inaccurate about that.
--
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UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' :
`. `'
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Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 01:45:03PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote: I was kind of thinking of udebootstrap, but that might be a bit more tricky. I've been kind-of thinking about that too, although I don't think it'd remotely resemble debootstrap on the implementation side. A udebootstrap would allow us to distribute the installer as a bootable kernel, udebootstrap-as-init, and a bunch of .udeb files that will be unpacked by udebootstrap to the point where cdebconf, anna and various retrievers and such work. This is by way of defining what udebootstrap means -- it creates a udeb-based system where there isn't already one. We don't have to do this at all -- d-i already works by just having an image of a working udeb-based system that you burn onto CD and boot, no bootstrapping required. Anyway. The first question is whether udebootstrap can even be implemented. It probably can be -- a statically linked busybox with ar, gzip and tar should let you do the initial unpacking, and since that _seems_ to be pretty much all that make tree does, there doesn't seem any great reason why you couldn't do that as part of booting the installer. Whether there's any point to all that's another matter. You're only buying yourself a smaller rootfs, and you're only doing it by giving yourself less ways of accessing the first set of udebs you want to install. If that means you can boot from a single floppy disk, rather than a boot-root pair, but only because you then need to insert another couple of floppies to get full versions of libc6 and wget-retriever, that's not a win. What's going to go on the rootfs? Presumably something like: libc6, busybox-udeb, ash-udeb udpkg, cdebconf, anna *-retriever and any dependencies they have /lib/modules/kernel/** ? Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/ I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.'' msg21596/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 02:36:33 +1000 Anthony Towns [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Whether there's any point to all that's another matter. You're only buying yourself a smaller rootfs, and you're only doing it by giving yourself less ways of accessing the first set of udebs you want to install. If that means you can boot from a single floppy disk, rather than a boot-root pair, but only because you then need to insert another couple of floppies to get full versions of libc6 and wget-retriever, that's not a win. There could be a really small initrd that unpacks udebs from the boot medium into a ramdisk. It would make the boot disk simple, just a boot loader, kernel, small initrd and whichever udebs, any filesystem could be used, even fat, no need for rawrite. Glenn -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1
Second status report, about a month has passed since the last one.
The todo list for d-i looked like this a month ago:
- - unbreak cdebconf
- - partitioner
- - multiple arch support
cdebconf has been unbroken. It works like a charm now, thanks a lot
to those who have helped.
I have some preliminary partition support working, but that still
needs lots more work, and it needs util-linux to generate udebs. In
addition, the code to mount those partitions in the right place needs
to be written. It is probably not hard, but needs to be done.
Multiple arch support has begun, Colin Walters is looking into getting
it to work on PowerPC, Wartan Hachaturow is trying to get it to work
on alpha.
I'd like to give a big thanks to our ftpmasters for processing the new
udebs quickly. It is appreciated and makes our work a lot easier. If
you could fix that bug in dak which unaccepts the new udebs as well,
it would be even greater.
Our RM wanted a limited, but working installer in approximately 14
days. I hope to meet that goal. In order to meet it, we need, at
least, the following things to be fixed:
- - partitioning/mkfs/mount stuff needs to be finished up.
- - dak needs to stop unaccepting new udebs.
- - prebaseconfig needs to stop using grub directly and depend on
{grub,lilo}-installer instead.
- - a bunch of full-sized udebs needs to be created (more on this below)
Nice-to-have features would be gpgv support (for verifying the
integrity of the stuff you download) and getting the UTF8 support into
Those full-sized udebs are needed because of library reduction, as
written in the ISSUES document:
It is difficult to reduce a library if you don't know what functions
in it will be used. Since additional modules could be dropped onto
install media at any time, it is very difficult to guarantee that a
reduced libc will have all the symbols they need.
The least insane way of handling this is probably to have a libc6
package and other full packages with the libraries we need; this
will waste some space, but is probably the only way to go for now.
Unless somebody comes up with a better way, that is the way we will
go.
As always, comments and thoughts appreciated.
- --
Tollef Fog Heen,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' :
`. `'
`-
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Re: debian-installer status -- 2002-08-26
On 26 Aug 2002 00:39:06 +0200 Tollef Fog Heen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, It is difficult to reduce a library if you don't know what functions in it will be used. Since additional modules could be dropped onto install media at any time, it is very difficult to guarantee that a reduced libc will have all the symbols they need. The least insane way of handling this is probably to have a libc6 package and other full packages with the libraries we need; this will waste some space, but is probably the only way to go for now. Unless somebody comes up with a better way, that is the way we will go. I was hoping that this problem won't come up, but it seems like it has... I like the way of having a full-libc6 udeb, for additional modules. Logic being that if one can install additional udebs, they should probably be able to install libc6.udeb. I was kind of thinking of udebootstrap, but that might be a bit more tricky. regards, junichi -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
