Re: bf rewrite?

[Erik Andersen <andersen@codepoet.org>]

On Sat Aug 19, 2000 at 07:29:13PM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> rumours said that the entire boot-floppies system is to be rewritten
> for woody?
> 
> While I agree that the current mass floppy requirement is a major pain
> with Debian, I don't believe that this would be a proper goal.
> 
> We wanted to freeze potato last year but had no working boot-floppies
> handy.  Only very few people have worked on it.
> 
> Since then development was very slow, people dropped away, Enrique,
> Erik.  Left over are only a couple of people who contribute code.

Not gone -- just less vocal and with less free time in the evenings since my
little boy was born in March.  

> I don't believe that "we" are able to rewrite the entire boot-floppies
> system from scratch within say three months so there is something to
> play with when something is about to be released.
> 
> Thus, if a new system is to be written, develop on it in parallel with
> the current system and replace the current one as soon as possible,
> but don't abandon the current system or we will run into the same
> desaster as last year again.

I think step one is to create a new archive section for "installer".  Then get
busybox (already packaged and ready to go), dbootstrap (not yet packaged, but
should be easy) and all the other installer specific packages ready.  This will
make life enormously easier since we then will not need to recompile
_everything_ for a simple dbootstrap update.

I think most people agree that dbootstrap need to stay for the time being -- it
just needs to be majorly cleaned up (since the code has gotten quite messy).

 -Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen   email:  andersee@debian.org
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