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new demo system -- chrooted!



This demo system is a bit bigger than the previous ones, because it is a
self-contained chrooted system!

http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/debian-installer/demo3.tar.gz

Once you unpack and cd in, do:

chroot . bin/sh
debconf-loadtemplate d-i var/lib/dpkg/info/*.templates
debconf usr/bin/main-menu

I won't paste a log, you've seen it before and it hasbn't changed much -- 
except that when it goes and downloads additional udebs, it downaloads
them direct from ftp.debian.org or whatever site you picked, and pulls
them out of the package pool.

The chrooted system is rather interesting, because we finally can start
getting a handle on size requirements. It is 8.6 mb unpacked. Most of
that space is due to libc6 and busybox, with the vast majority (+- 8.2
mb) being libc6.

I just unpacked the libc6 deb into the chroot; there is certianly a great
deal of stuff like timezone data, some locale data, etc that can just be
removed if we did a libc6.udeb. Plus, it's time to start thinking about
library reduction. Marcus, do you have plans to make the library
reduction code into a standalone debian package or something, and will
it be possible to point it at a tree like the one in my demo and tell it
to just look at all the binaries in there and do library reduction to
yeild a miminal libc?

The 160k being used by busybox is also too much, we will need to start
getting a grip on exactly which busybox programs the system is using and
remove the rest to a second-stage busybox udeb. I think it would be nice
if we could detect this automatically, but short of running the entire
system in a strace and grepping out the execs of the busybox stuff, I
don't know how we can do it automatically. Another option would be to
require that every udeb state each busybox program that it depend on
(possibly in its dependancnes; Depends: busybox-tar, busybox-gzip, etc).

Besides cutting down on space, now that we have a usable charooted
system, we can start writing the modules that actually handle the
install. David Whedon's netcfg is a good example, and I would like to
see that and ethdetect integrated into the next demo system so it can
detect the ethernet card, set up networking, and then go do its thing.

It's also time for people to start working on things like disk
partitioners, formatters, etc. The base is there, if you're careful you
will be able to test your work in the demo chroot w/o blowing away your
real system.

-- 
see shy jo



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