Re: debian-installer status
Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> I must say, I am a little suprised that Joey Hess hasn't been touching
> this at all. I don't see any reason why work on this cannot proceed
> (although I think it shouldn't detract from getting woody out).
A variety of reasons of course. They include:
- Wanting to get out of your way. I've very happy that b-f is progressed
to where it has.
- Not working at VA, so having a distinct lack of tons of machines to
install Debian on, and a concordant loss of some motivation to work on
d-i. I still wanna see it happen though.
- Having available only one computer with a floppy drive, which cannot be
put on the net. This is a trifle annoying, and I hope to find the money
to correct it soon.
Anyway, with Adam's green light, I want to move forward on d-i again.
First we have to take stock of what's changed in the past many months,
fix bit-rot, etc. I've unstuck the daily auto-builds, so those will be
showing up every day again. If you have committed to the
debian-installer tree since February, please mail me and summarize
anything of note that you've done. Figuring this out from the cvs logs
is a PITA, since some stuff has been moved around.
The first big stumbling block that the system has *exploded* in size.
We're about 233K too big (and we used to be several hundred K under the
max size..) I am contacting the worst offenders and trying to get it
back to something that will fit on a floppy. I am also going to be
working on some programs tonight to automatically detect any positivle
size changes in the future, and raise red flags. Anyone who wants to
work on d-i in the next week, first concentrate on size. I want to get
it back to fitting on one floppy by next Wednesday. Here's the current
breakdown on the size changes:
- /bin is 53k bigger!
- busybox: +52k why? Only added program is busybox vi.
- I've mailed Erik, asking to reduce this.
- /lib/modules is about 520k bigger !!!
- 22k of tokenring stuff (why?)
- 511k of net/ stuff. This probably needs to be
severely trimmed down, to just the following
common cards:
3c501.o, 3c503.o, 3c505.o, 3c507.o,
3c515.o, 3c59x.o, 82596.o, 8390.o,
eepro100.o, ne.o, ne2k-pci.o,
via-rhine.o, tulip.o
that will result in it being only 5k bigger than
it used to be.
- I've mailed Herbert about this.
- /var/lib/dpkg is 3k bigger
(no new packages were added though)
- /sbin is 15k bigger
- insmod: +15k (feh)
- /dev is 3k bigger
- the reduced libraries in lib have grown a bit, but
it's just libc bloat; the reducer seems to be working,
so nothing more can easily be done
--
see shy jo
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