Re: first weekly debian-installer status report
Erik Andersen wrote:
> > - busybox integration [Erik Anderson?]
> > Not started. Busybox needs to build one or more .udebs.
> > Probably more than one.
>
> I claim this one. (btw, it is "Andersen" not "Anderson" :-).
That'll teach me to not cut and paste names always. You have it of
course.
> Do know which apps you want compiled in at this point? Shall I use the same
> set as the current boot floppies provides? Shall I just compile in everyhting
> for now?
I suspect that what we will eventually want is at least 2 debs.
One of them will contain whatever busybox utilities are used by the core
of the debian installer, up to the point when it becomes cable of
retreiving udebs from the net or cd or whatever. So it will include ar
and tar and gunzip because udpkg uses them, etc. The requirements here
are a little ill-defined so far. We can probably come up with some
fairly automatic way of extracting the data about which utilities are
used.
The other will include pretty much everything, with some common sense
used to kick out the really esoteric stuff. It will replace the first
one once it is downloaded.
> > - retreiver control program [UNCLAIMED]
> > Not started. Sort of like apt, except tons dumber, this
> > uses retreiver(s) to download Packages files and then udebs,
> > and calls udpkg to install them.
>
> Hmm. lemme get the retreiver ready first, then I may take this one on. Put me
> down for a tentative claim. No point in worrying too much about the walls till
> the foundation is set...
I want to do some work on this soon myself, as it seems like the logical next
step. No retreiver is really needed to use it, as the simplest possible
retreiver is .... cp (yep, it follows the basic spec, though not
entirely. Good enough for testing)!
There are several parts to this, and it probably needs some more thought. The
obvious part is it has to be able to parse Packages files and cause a subset of
the packages listed to be downloaded and installed. The non-obvious bit is it
may not want to install all the packages in a Packages file, (and how will it
know which ones to install?), and it may need to do ordering of packages to
ensure dependancies are met (depending on whether udpkg does that or not). There are
also interesting questions like what does it do if two retreivers are
available, retreive all the udebs from both?
> > - http retreiver [UNCLAMED]
> > Not started. Download udebs, other files from network.
>
> I claim this one as well. This will be based on busybox wget. I presume we
> will also need support for other types of retrievers? ftp? cdrom? nfsmount?
> mounted filesystem?
Adam Heath is interested in using snarf instead. I think the
requirements are:
* small
* http proxy support
* optional resume support
I guess whichever is smaller and best wins... just don't put too much
effort into competing; let's pick the winner w/o too much work being
done on the loser, ok?
We don't need the other retreivers yet.
--
see shy jo
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