Bug#379057: Please allow to deselect the modules that get loaded by default
Package: debian-installer
Severity: wishlist
Hi,
Debian-installer keeps growing, which makes installing on low-ram
machines harder as time goes by. Sometimes such growth is necessary; in
other cases, the memory footprint grows to add features which admittedly
are nice, but aren't required for every installation.
Consider, for example, the following udebs:
partman-lvm
partman-crypto
partman-*fs
partman-md
While these all add functionality that allows one to do interesting
things with debian-installer, it is also true that they all require
memory to be used for functionality of which at least some is not going
to be used during any random install session. At least, I don't expect
many people to be interested in a system which contains one reiserfs
partition, one ext3 partition, an ext2 one, and some JFS and XFS
partitions, too -- all this on LVM on RAID, with swapspace encrypted.
Some people might be, but they're probably just testing d-i's
functionality...
Of course there's lowmem which helps in reducing RAM usage, but I
suspect that the memory usage of these modules has more impact on the
actual memory footprint than whatever lowmem may do. Case at hand: my
latest install run on my VME box (which has 64M of RAM, and no way to
extend that) failed due to a segfault somewhere (which I suspect may be
related to low-ram conditions), where it previously never did.
Unfortunately, there is no way for me to disable downloading these
modules, so I have to load them all. It would be preferable if I could
just tell d-i somehow that of the above modules, I'm only interested in
partman-ext3 and that it does not need to load any of the other modules.
This could perhaps be nice for other things beside partman-*, too,
although I don't know about that in too much detail.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.17-1-powerpc
Locale: LANG=nl_BE.UTF-8@euro, LC_CTYPE=nl_BE.UTF-8@euro (charmap=UTF-8)
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