di: seperate preperation and installation phases
If we have a seperate preperation and installation phase then it would
make the installer more versatile.
The actual installation phase could be much like what debootsrap does,
and the preperation stage would involve preparing an environment for
deboostrap to run.
The preperation phase could involve
- partitioning
- network configuration, for deboostrap to use
- hardware detection, identify required kernel modules
- putting all this in an image somewhere
The preperation stage would ideally be run in the current environment
(pre-install), it may be an existing debian machine, a different linux
distribution or even another OS such as the Hurd (or a BSD?), if no
previous OS exists then it would have to fall back to a more traditional
preparation stage.
The installation phase would be native to the OS being installed, it
would just have to run this pre made image which would install base to
the targeted pre-prepared partition.
We could then install the Hurd from a linux system, or vica versa. It
would be simpler in a lot of cases to make better use of the previous OS
rather than always starting from scratch.
Identifying the stages as seperate may also make it easier to work on as
it helps break down the problem a bit more.
(but i havent read the plan for a while, maybe im out of touch)
Glenn
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