On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 12:08:22PM +0000, Philip Charles wrote:
> On Thu, 24 May 2001, Ethan Benson wrote:
> > IMO debootstrap needs to support a tarball method where it fetches
> > debs out of a tarball. but if not then i guess we will have to accept
> > that debian can be installed only with direct internet access or via
> > CDROM. not via hard disk.
(It'd also stop pure floppy installs, which'd be a pity)
What I think I'll do is separate out the base-download and the actual
unpacking and install.
> If there is no option for a tarball with a root filesystem in debian-boot,
> then the Hurd is in trouble.
Note that this is a different problem, and will have to be solved
differently. For floppy/hard disk installs, it suffices to have a
"base.tgz" that contains /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb, and to untar
that and then run debootstrap essentially normally.
> At present the Hurd is installed two ways.
> First, by a cross install where the tarball is unpacked onto a Hurd
> partition from a Linux system. Secondly, where the tarball is
> incorporated into a modified boot-floppies and installed in a more or less
> standard way. The same tarball is used by both methods. A medium term
> solution as far as the Hurd is concerned is not to move beyond the Woody
> boot-floppies and to develop them further if this is needed.
If you have a native Hurd installer --- in particular, if you can chroot
into the Hurd /target from the boot-floppies kernel --- then debootstrap
should work with it in a fairly straight forward manner, and you can just
use woody b-f's.
If you aren't able to make a native Hurd installer (no cfdisk, kernel
can't be booted before the system's installed on the hdd (doesn't fit
on a floppy?)), then you'll want to use debootstrap to build a chroot
on a Hurd system, tar that up, and hack boot-floppies to unpack that
and fiddle around with it instead of calling debootstrap.
Either of these require patches to debootstrap to make it work on Hurd...
Or you can do something different, like maintaining potato b-f's, and
otherwise being randomly inconsistent with Debian GNU/Linux.
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.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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