Re: Merging partman
On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 09:16:43PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > I have some cause to think about creating a .deb of partman: it would be
> > useful in a live CD installer that wants to do autopartitioning using
> > the same code as is used in the regular installer. For several reasons
> > I'd much rather create one sensible-sized .deb instead of 18 tiny .debs,
> > but I can't do that at the moment because partman is broken down into
> > lots of little source packages.
>
> FWIW, I've seen some users asking if they can use partman after the
> install, and I expect more after sarge is released.
Yep. I don't expect that to be instantly solved, of course; no doubt
we'll run into some cdebconfisms and installer-specific pieces. Plus,
the live CD case is much easier as you can always unmount all
filesystems on the disk you're partitioning in order that the kernel can
re-read the partition table, whereas that isn't true after a normal
installation.
> > I understand why partman is broken down into lots of *binary* udebs, and
> > obviously we can't change that without having a serious effect on lowmem
> > installations and so on. However, I don't think there's really a good
> > reason any more why it shouldn't be a single source package.
> >
> > Would anyone (especially Anton) object to me merging the whole lot
> > together? I was basically thinking of creating packages/partman/debian/
> > and leaving the other directories more or less as they are now, although
> > some further rationalisation there might make sense later.
>
> I like this, especially as it makes the partman directory no longer a
> special case.
>
> Only problem I can think of would be if we need to release one bit while
> avoiding releaseing other changes to another bit, but there's always
> braching..
There's also the question of versioning. Conveniently, partman itself
currently has a higher version number than partman-*, so the merged
source package could just start out at 65 or 70 or whatever.
> Oh, and you'll have to do something about the naming, as we cannot have
> both partman-* .debs and .udebs in the archive. Ugh.
partition-manager.deb seems reasonable.
One other issue is that lots of partman code hardcodes
/lib/partman/definitions.sh and similar, which will have to move to
/usr/lib for FHS-compliance in a .deb. Maybe we should just move this in
the installer too, and leave a symlink behind.
The debian/po/ directories will be fiddly, but probably workable given
some coordination with Christian ...
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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