Re: di: seperate preperation and installation phases

[Glenn McGrath <bug1@optushome.com.au>]

Thierry Laronde wrote:
> 
> Yep. There are several ideas in FreeBSD that I do like [I don't know if you
> remember but last year, there was a thread about the need for a "static
> shell" for recovery --- sash ; I have seen that sash is as big as a static
> ash without all the functionnalities of ash; and you know what ? In FreeBSD, the
> standard shell is ash, and is statically compiled...]
> 
Busybox's (lash) shell has improved greatly in the last few months, and
is perfectly fine for users, i like it better than ash, at least you can
call up you previous commands which you couldnt do with ash last time i
used it.

Busybox has a second shell thats starting to be tested more widely now,
called hush, its going to be better again, should be able to run shell
scripts.

> >
> > 2. An install system that isn't inherently Debian or Linux specific.  I would
> > love to see an system that was designed from the ground up to support a wide
> > variety of platforms.  This is a real tough one.  Maybe it doesn't make sense,
> > but I'd rather see us developing something that can be used by non-Debian
> > systems (like apt).
> 

Not that tough, just a matter of porting busybox, which is what i want
to do to get a native hurd installer going.

I think if the installer becomes more integrated into busybox it will
make things better, i did get half way through betting anna into
busybox, it could fetch and sort package files, but then i got hung up
trying to get a better solution for handling all the different package
fields in one struct. Now im using trees, so there is a binary tree of
packages, and each package has a bianry tree of fields.
Ive had to go back and reorganised a few of other functions, some of
them have been slightly larger, but there is more code reuse, so in the
end i hope it is beneficial.

Im trying to get dpkg working and compatable with the real dpkg now,
then i will start back on anna, if i can get a floppy retriever and wget
retriever in busybox then just having busybox will get us a fair way.


Glenn