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boot-floppies status from an insider (was Re: Deficiencies in Debian)



Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr> writes:

> I am on debian-boot for a long time. The truth is that a lot of people are 
> doing small things but nobody leads. No management. No decisions.

I would agree with this.  Enrique would probably appreciate someone
taking over management and coordination of boot-floppies.

> The current package does not compile (for nobody)

True.  At least I just recently fixed my documentation stuff.

> and there are important design decisions (two are specially
> important: how to split the rescue disk for the larger kernel 2.2
> and how to replace the old Tasks/Profiles system, which everybody
> criticiezs, but nobody replaces) which are pending.

Untrue.  Both of these are resolved but not completely implemented.

Regarding boot/root, we've decided simply to build a 1.4k image for
boot, and another 1.4k image for root.  CD-ROM booting should be able
to use a 2.8k El Torito (or equivalent) single image for both.  TFTP
shouldn't have a big problem with this scheme either.

Regarding tasks/profiles, Martin Babinsky (sp) has spear-headed a
meta-packages based effort, which seems to be on it's way.  Now we
need a new GUI to allow users to select their tasks and profiles, and
then testing.  In this flow, newbies can skip dselect altogether.

Here's my unofficial boot-floppies TODO:

  * build for all supported arches

  * eliminate all dselect acquisition methods aside from apt and 
    possibly mountable (for NFS, which apt doesn't handle -- socks
    also not handled by apt but I don't know if we care)

  * GUI for apt's sources.list configuration

  * GUI for tasks/profiles (see above)

  * better lilo configuration (borrow from slackware perhaps?)

  * close bugs!

  * nifty stuff like TFTP and and serial console installation should be
    supported on all possible architectures
    (TFTP images may require some software in Debian which is not currently
     available)

  * update documentation (too early to do this)


--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>


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