Re: todo?

[Tollef Fog Heen <tollef@add.no>]

* "Noah L. Meyerhans" 

| Hi.  I am feeling compelled to help with the new Debian installer,
| because I strongly believe that sarge needs to have a shorter gestation
| process than woody did, and I keep hearing that debian-install is likely
| to be the big bottle neck, and that sarge may end up taking well over 18
| months to get released.  To me that is simply not acceptable.

Great to hear -- we are working hard on ensuring that d-i won't be the
bottleneck, but are too few people. :/

| I can help with testing on several platforms.  I have 32 bit and 64 bit
| SPARC systems that I can netboot and CD boot, G3 and G4 PowerPC Macs, a
| MIPS R4400 that I can netboot (and probably CD boot) and x86 stuff.  I
| might be able to come up with m68k boxes.  

Getting d-i to work on other arches than i386 is high-priority.
Download the sources, build it, make it boot, check it in, ask here,
on #debian-boot on OPN if you have any questions.  i386 is actually
coming into shape.  It has a text-only installer which works, at least
some of the time. ;)

I'm going to write up a status report this week which will outline
some of the outstanding issues -- a lot of them are minor, like wrong
debconf priorities all over the place and wrong priorities on packages
in the archive, but they need to be handled as well.  Some other
issues are large: porting.  getting a gtk frontend up and running.
getting stuff like automatic/kickstart installs working.  i18n.

We could use a dedicated cdebconf hacker -- I am trying to handle all
the small bits which are failing here and there, so even though I am
probably one of the people knowing the code base best, I can't handle
that in addition to my other duties.

| I am also willing to help code where necessary.  I am about to download
| the source from cvs.debian.org, and I know about the doc/ subdirectory
| that I should be reading.  Is there anything else that I should know
| right now?  Any hints you can give me?  I really want to see sarge
| released before too long, and am willing to dedicate time to the
| installer.

if you want to help with the small bits:  start by installing on a
box, see what irritates you, it being wrong debconf priorities or
something else, and fix it.  If you can't fix it: file bugs.

if you are up for some large stuff, like porting: make d-i boot on
sparc (or m68k or ppc or something other non-i386).  once you have it
working, go through the install till you are satistified with the
arch-specific parts like boot-loader installation etc.  Repeat for
next arch.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-