Re: Ideas

[Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es>]

On Sun, Jun 27, 1999 at 05:14:01PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
[...]
> The problems people are having with the multi-CD install could be helped
> in a very simple way. (I assume that people have noticed confused posts to
> debian-user.) People are not seeing the README on each disc that explains
> about inserting the last binary disc first for Update in dselect. I'm
> going to patch the dpkg-multicd method to insert a message in the Update
> step itself, so people should now no longer be able to miss this. And to
> fix the other source of confusion, I'll also add a warning that in many
> cases a simple install will never use any disks subsequent to the first
> one... 

IMHO, dpkg-multicd has many other problems. It doesn't do package
ordering, it doesn't handle predependencies (trying to install netscape
in a new installation is a show-stopper. As it pre-depends on dpkg-awk,
installation doesn't work, and it leaves the /var/lib/dpkg/status
database in an unusable state. One has to manually edit it to be able to
make another install run in dselect. Not for the average user)...

Again IMHO, apt-cdrom is a more promising tool. I hacked an aptcdrom
dselect method for slink that handled multi-cd installations on a nice
way. On dselect Access step, the user introduces all the binary CDs he
wants, in any order. On Install step, apt-get orders the selected package
list by CD, ask the user to insert each CD in turn, copies the packages
to /var/cache/apt/archives (just like the ftp or http method do) and then
does an ordered installation. Of course that means the cache directory
has to be on a big partition, but making an ordered installation from a
multi-CD set, without changing CDs several times and without copying the
needed packages to a single medium is "non-trivial". :-)

--
Enrique Zanardi					   ezanardi@ull.es