James: YA crazy idea :)
On Sat, Aug 19, 2000 at 07:29:13PM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> I don't believe that "we" are able to rewrite the entire boot-floppies
> system from scratch within say three months so there is something to
> play with when something is about to be released.
>
> Thus, if a new system is to be written, develop on it in parallel with
> the current system and replace the current one as soon as possible,
> but don't abandon the current system or we will run into the same
> desaster as last year again.
Amen.
Two things.
I'd like it if people could make woody boot-floppies, say, once a month
while we're developing (for all architectures expected to release). If you
want to also include some new features or whatever and get them tested,
fine, but mainly it'd be nice to have some evidence that we can still
build boot-floppies, and we haven't done anything to mean that the potato
boot-floppies are completely unusable and we *have* to start from scratch.
When debian-installer can be used to install machines of all six released
architectures (arm, alpha, i386, m68k, powerpc, sparc), you can switch
to doing monthly uploads of debian-installer. And start completely
deprecating the old boot-floppies.
I also wonder if there might be a better way of handling release notes
and boot-floppies and base.tgz's and such from a dinstall perspective. In
particular, I wonder if it would be better for Josip and Adam or whoever
to simply make a release-notes.deb that they maintain independently
of boot-floppies and that's easily buildable (since we have a definite
.tar.gz with Build-Depends). I wonder if it would be workable for us to
automatically extract the actual release notes from the latest version
of that .deb and stick them in doc/ or woody/main/{disks,upgrade}-*
as appropriate. Similarly for creating the base.tgz, and perhaps actual
boot-floppies (extracted from /usr/lib/boot-floppies/i386-compat-1440.img
in the boot-floppies.deb, perhaps).
This might make it *much* easier for you guys to maintain all this stuff
(you don't have to get an ftpmaster to install for you, dinstall will just
handle it by itself; you won't have to have a local mirror to construct
base.tgz, since dinstall will do that from the actual archive; you won't
have to worry about base.tgz being out of date), and should make it much
easier for the ftpmasters to deal with boot-floppies (the only things
that need to be changed by hand are which packages make up base.tgz).
Something to think about, anyway, perhaps.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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