Re: Re: Re: di-netboot-assistant - toward version 1.0

[Franklin PIAT <fpiat@bigfoot.com>]

Hello,

On Tuesday 03 June 2008, Franklin PIAT wrote:
> I had a small home-made script to retrieve and untar Debian Installer
> netboot images.

I've had a few though toward a di-netboot-assistant version 1.0 (read:
more robust with less heuristics). The problem is that today, di-n-a is
doing some black-magic to detect the bootloader, and determine which
files should be "patched" to rewrite the menu files according to the
location where the files got extracted.

What about the following two ideas (which should be done on the
debian-installer side, not on di-netboot-assistant side ;)

*** Pack D-I netboot images in a consistent way, for all archs.

Currently, some arch like arm and mips provide multiple individual
files, but no .tar.gz file, that's harder to fetch.
Also, some architectures (like sparc, alpha and hppa) provide a single
boot.img, but nothing else.

Providing consistent "pack" of files would help unpacking them.

Actually, I've fount the way the i386/ia64/amd64 tar.gz files are
arranged to be very convenient :
- It's a tar.gz, so it can be expanded on any [tftp server] system.
- It contains a common "top" directory (debian-installer/$arch), so 
  it's easy to rewrite the included configuration files, in case the
  file is extracted in a different directory
  ('s/debian-installer\/$arch/foobar/').

This layout also has two nice side effects :
1.It's possible to provide a meta-data file, to describe the 
  content of the tar file (currently, it's "version.info", but it 
  could be enhanced to contain arch, dist, bootloader type, 
  arch-variant, d-i variant... Also, another file could
  contain individual files check-sums, etc
2.It's possible to *not* extract the meta-data file when the 
  netboot files are extracted.
  (thanks to "tar -zxf foo.tar.gz --strip=2")


*** Provide .Package and .Release like files
It would be great to have file that lists all the available
netboot for a given distribution, very similar to .Release and 
.Packages files that are referenced in /etc/apt/sources.list.
Benefits :
- It would be possible to list all netboot images in a single place.
- It would be possible to provide checksum of those files.
- It would be possible to sign all those files.

What do you think about it ?

I don't think this could be achieved by Lenny, but it would be great to
have it in Lenny+1.

Franklin