Re: boot-floppies status from an insider (was Re: Deficiencies in Debian)
On Wed, Sep 22, 1999 at 11:19:20PM +0100, Martin Keegan wrote:
> On 22 Sep 1999, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
>
> > At this point we are *so* far behind I'd rather just drop old
> > hardware, or rather, if people wanna work on it and get it going, then
> > fine, if not, we drop it. No biggie.
> >
> > Note that there *do* seem to be people fighting for 5.25" floppy
> > support yet (which is pretty easy to do I guess).
>
> I have secured access to a box with a 5.25 for testing this.
>
> > Lowmem is another story though. I don't think even the slink
> > boot-floppies worked right for lowmem, so I would propose to
> > back-burner that, and if we don't get around to it, so what. :)
>
> It's unlikely that a site techie enough still to be using an x86 box with
> <8Mb of RAM is not also going to have ethernet or a CD rom drive.
I prefer dropping very rare situations. A techie is able to resolve them
easily (Plug the drive into a second machine etc).
Currently i see the problem with the 99% people having the
biggest hardware (CD, Ethernet, >128MB, Floppy, >10GB HD) but
who dont have the smallest clue what a "lilo" and a "kernel-module" is.
So this is a political question. Do we want to support 4-8 year old
hardware which is quiet uncommon now - Or are we heading mainstream.
My preference would be - Large steps direction mainstream, gfx installer,
drop support for installation without cd or network, drop support
for 5 1/4" and <16MB.
With this you have 90% of all Users. For the 10% left we might get
some quick'n'dirty hacks with getting a dump from an nfs server
automatical or something.
Flo
PS: As you might have noticed "I have secured access to a box with a 5.25
for testing this.". This shows the rareness of this Hardware.
--
Florian Lohoff flo@rfc822.org +49-5241-470566
... The failure can be random; however, when it does occur, it is
catastrophic and is repeatable ... Cisco Field Notice
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