Re: Design information on D-I compared to dbootstrap ? and more.
> As It now seems I will be using boot-floppies for
> a while on, I'm curious to know a bit more of other
> peoples earlier concerns with this installation
> method.
>From a user's perspective boot-floppies offers a lot of options, this
is good and bad. People with obscure hardware are pleased that they
can preload modules from a floppy to access their hard drive, but 99%
of users won't ever use that option, for example. We do have a
verbose and a non-verbose mode that helps with some of this, though we
err on the side of caution (that is, asking questions if we can't be
completely sure we can guess the correct answer). It has been said
that a chicken can install boot-floppies if you put a piece of corn on
the return key. This is mostly true. boot-floppies asks a lot of
questions but the default answer is for the most part what users
should choose.
>From a developer's point of view boot-floppies is large and has a fair
number of ugly files (choose_medium.c is perhaps the best example,
IMO). The build system is complicated and uses a lot of different
languages, though nothing obscure. The build takes a long time to
complete (20 minutes or so on a 2-year old i386, many hours on m68k).
>
> Is there some gathered collection of intallaton
> difficulties or design complaints over the years ?
> Where?
You can take a look at http://bugs.debian.org/boot-floppies
especally in the wishlist section.
>
> I would also like to see if there is any possibility
> of me doing some smaller hacking into the old boot
> floppies package to do some smaller workaround fixes.
sure. No big changes or new features will likely be accepted into cvs
but bug fixes are encouraged. If you have new features that are
obviously correct, tested and won't break anything they might be
accepted as well. If you need to make bigger changes you can fork
development and keep your own tree.
> What language was woodys debootstrap developed in?
debootstrap is a shell script, it is used by both debian-installer and
boot-floppies to install the base system once a harddrive is
partitioned.
dbootstrap is the boot-floppies install program. It is in C.
>
> Are the debian bootfloppies still maintained ?
maintained but not with vigor. The installer in Debian has typically
been a stumbling block, not gotten perhaps as much attention as it
deserves. We're hoping that debian-installer will be more fun to work
on. With limited resources we'd like most people to concentrate on
debian-installer.
> by whome ?
The people on this list for the most part.
-David
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