Bug#127677: boot-floppies: problems with reinstalling base-system

[Philip Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

In message <[🔎] 1010345626.3c38a69a7165d@sourcepole.ch>, Tomas Pospisek? writes:
>That when something breaks during install of the basesystem, as f.ex.
>a disk error etc., a newby will *not* be able to finish the installation.
>He will have to start from scratch (reformat partition!)

What stops the old base system from just being overwritten?  Did you see an 
error message?  If so, what was it?  There shouldn't be any need to remove
the old files first.

That said, I don't think that failures while installing from basedebs.tgz
are worth busting a gut to legislate for.  Once basedebs.tgz is in the right
place in the archive it should be much less likely that people are going to
make the mistake you did and install a totally bogus archive; and considering
that this stuff is being both read from and written to a local hard disk,
the possibility of transient problems seems quite remote too.  (As opposed to
debootstrap, where there is a real danger that a brief network outage might
screw you up halfway.)

And, in the worst case, having to go back and reinitialise the partition is
hardly the end of the world.

p.