Re: Hacking on d-i

[Andrew Pollock <apollock@debian.org>]

On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 01:00:32PM +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
> I'd like to make a few minor changes for my own use - specify my local 
> mirror, maybe partition layout and such.
> 
> I started out by unpacking the initrd to see what's in it, and was 
> pretty happy to see debian-installer is a shell script: there's almost 
> no limit to the magic one can do there on a good day:-)
> 
> There's no clue there as to what to do, but I did try the alternative 
> f/e (bogl) and discovered it does nothing useful.
> 
> A bit of  finding and grepping and I discovered where the list of 
> mirrors is. I've _not_ found a sensible way to change that list, nor  to 
> specify my preferred value in any kind of configuration file.
> 
> Next, I went looking for the d-i home page. I tried 
> www.debian.org/debian-installer - no, not there. Finally, Google gave up 
> some clues and I finished up at https://alioth.debian.org/projects/d-i/

Have you been to http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer ?
 
> There, I find "This project has no visible documents ."
> No subprojects have been set up, or you cannot view them.

What you need to do is checkout a copy of the d-i subversion repository.

See http://www.nl.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/svn

There's a lot of documentation, some of it quite enlightening within a
directory of the source tree.
 
> The question: where is the information I need to change the mirror to be 
> chosen,  specify any initial defaults I need?
> 
> btw My browser doesn't like the certificate from this site, its issuer 
> is unknown.
> 

Yep, that's normal. :-|

Andrew