Re: [woody,debinst] Interim filesystem

[bug1 <bug1@netconnect.com.au>]

Joey Hess wrote:
> 
> bug1 wrote:
> > > What is the advantage to delaying partitioning, get it out of the way
> > > fast and you have the whole harddrive to play with.
> > >
> > If you get it out the way first, then you limit how powerfull it can be.
> >
> > If we delay partitioning till after the installer has accessed the
> > debinian binary archive then partitioning tools can be taken from the
> > archive rather than being included with the installer.
> 
> This is quite true, however, the design I came up with also allows you
> to download the partitioner from somewhere, without the expense of
> installing a scratch install of debian too.
> 
> > If we can have anything from the debian archive prior to partitioning we
> > can get binaries to do filesystem resizing, LVM, raid,  without
> > includeing them in the installer.
> >
> > We could also delay partitioning till after a hardware detection stage
> > which gives time for kernel modules to be inserted incase any hardware
> > that should be repartitioned wasnt detected by the boot kernel.
> 
> Also supported by my design.
> 

In your design these programs would be unpacked to ramdisk i assume, ram
is more scarce than hdd space.

If we didnt *depend* on the use of a ramdisk we would be able to install
to 4MB (maybe less), ramdisk is usefull though and should be used
whenever possible.

I think it is a worthy goal for debian to try and get smaller as well as
bigger, personally id like to see the installer work on machines with
4MB RAM, 20MB HDD.

Glenn