Re: [woody,debinst] (Was: Re: [dbootstrap] `newt' and `boxes.c', `bogl' and `bowl'[, `???' and `boxeX.c'?])

[Erik Andersen <andersen@codepoet.org>]

On Sat Jun 17, 2000 at 01:29:43PM +1000, bug1 wrote:
> >  Red Hat's `libfdisk' contains a partition editor with a `newt'
> >  interface.  It might be possible to port it to our system and hook
> >  that into our Woody `debinst' `dbootstrap'.
> > 
> What about parted, it doesnt have much a of a GUI, but it wouldnt be
> hard to do i dont think.
> I think the ability to resize existing partitions (non destructivve
> install) is one most users would really like.

Agreed re parted.  I think a cool project would be hacking a GUI similar to
cfdisk into parted...

> >  Can shell scripts be compressed and executed via "zcat SCRIPT |
> >  /bin/sh"?  Would that buy us some space?  How about other
> >  executables?  Can they easily be compressed somehow?  (launched
> >  through a shell script that does autodecompress or something?)
> > 
> Cramfs is a compressed read-only filesystem in 2.4, it compresses each
> block, so it doesnt get the same compression as you would on the whole
> file.

Using compressed ext2 could also work.  Works just like regular ext2 until you
chattr files, at which point they are transparently compressed/uncompressed.

> I have heard of a way you can make bziped executables, only read about
> it though.

If you look at an strace of these type of things, you will see that
the uncompress themselves into /tmp and then exec the newly extracted
file in /tmp, and have an atexit to delete the file.  This is not
a good way to do things IMHO.

 -Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen   Web:    http://www.xmission.com/~andersen/ 
                   email:  andersee@debian.org
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