Re: Bug#174335: acknowledged by developer (Re: Bug#174335: acknowledged by developer (Re: Bug#174335: no boot floppies for testing))
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tollef Fog Heen" <tollef@add.no>
To: "Zefram" <zefram@fysh.org>; <174335@bugs.debian.org>
Cc: <debian-boot@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2002 8:48 AM
Subject: Re: Bug#174335: acknowledged by developer (Re: Bug#174335:
acknowledged by developer (Re: Bug#174335: no boot floppies for testing))
> * Zefram
>
> | What would have avoided my confusion would be a note in the release list
> | or the installation manual (preferably both) explicitly saying "The
> | testing distribution cannot be installed directly; install stable and
> | then upgrade.". I can't currently find on the website any indication
> | that testing differs from stable in any respect other than the maturity
> | of the code.
>
> But that's not true. What's true is that you can't install testing or
> sid using boot-floppies. However, boot-floppies are EOL-ed and being
> replaced with the new debian-installer. debian-installer was recently
> released in an alpha version, and until it is more stable, I think it
> is reasonable that it's not better documented how to get it
> installed.
But where in the documentation does it mention that boot-floppies are being
EOL-ed? I only found this out after people started yelling at me because I
wanted to add some more functionality to the boot-floppies, and so far I
still am yet to find out information on how to actually install using
debian-installer.
You know, it's wonderful to know that there is a bunch of people who seem to
know what is going on, but come on now, you people have been screaming at
anyone who has been trying to help with the effort of making a more useful
debian installation system, especially when those people even did RTFM as
requested (especially Eduard Bloch, he's the most obnoxious of you all so
far).
You are being rude to people who are trying to install the system, and make
a more functional system... at this rate you are not going to get new
users... when I started using Debian everyone was actually interested in
getting the new users, and making changes, and stuff. But now it seems that
people are too lazy to be even the slightest bit interested in that - and
they then yell it out in the list.
Well, there are some of us who want to help, and make changes to the system
to improve it, there are also others who have great ideas, but can't code to
save their life, and expecting those users to come up with code patches
because you don't want to see messages asking for improvements just ranks
high on my list of wrong. Oh, and the debian bug-tracking system is also
supposed to be used for "change requests" as well as reporting actual bugs
and code patches... The initial creators of the system understood that not
everyone is capable of creating worthwhile code.
Oh, and if you want a massive stuff up - follow this - I'm a user intending
to install debian on about ten machines and I need to have the install
starting on each of them this afternoon... I go to www.debian.org as I can't
remember there being a network installer... there I look at
"Documentation->Installation Manual" I look up the manual for i386 (as the
machines are the i386 platform, as the majority of webservers and that are
becoming these days), I see an option "4.5 Preparing files for tftp net
booting"... I select that... It goes into some complicated details, so I
follow along and try it - nothing... in fact the systems complain about
errors and other fun messages (which after searching other websites I find
out is because the installer file is too large.... hmm... I check for other
installer files - and come up completely empty)... After spending two hours
getting all this configured and apparently working... I give up and go to
www.redhat.com and go to their installation documentation and have the
installation system up and running in about 30 minutes.... Later on I go
back and start looking through mailing lists and such and I find out that
the debian boot people have four messages about network installs - and two
say "yay the installer worked" but two mention how annoying it was to have
to create boot media... at this point I'm a little amazed as the
documentation NEVER mentions boot media...
All in all, that is the basic run-down of what happened to my husband a few
weeks back, I then proceeded to create some network boot media for the i386
platform and asked if anyone wanted it (in other words, should I actually
refine it down)... I got four messages telling me to just get lost as I
didn't include the actual stuff (heck, I wasn't planning on uploading a 30Mb
file to a mailing list...), and two messages from people who wanted a copy,
and one from someone saying that it is nice that there is someone working on
the boot-floppies network installer, even though it now works with
debian-installer.... At this point, I was actually rather upset as I had
spent three days working on the network installer as I could not find
anywhere on a search of the debian site anything about doing a network
install of debian, and in fact a search of the website looking for
"debian-installer" returns 0 responses.
I am still trying to find out where/what this new installer is...
Regards,
Cassandra
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