Re: [RFR] Proposal for installs without network connection
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> Frans Pop wrote:
>> The patch leaves one important issue open though.
>> If the user is installing from CD, you don't want him to be able to select
>> a different suite for the mirror to be used for pkgsel than was used for
>> base installation from CD.
>> So you still want to either disable selection of the mirror/suite in
>> choose-mirror, or just ignore it in generators/50mirror (maybe with a
>> warning) and use cdrom/codename instead.
>
> If someone really wants to do that, why not just let them, it might
> break some of the time, but then installing current etch from an old etch
> CD will also break some of the time.
On amd64 a lot of new hardware requires a 2.6.12+ kernel, which means
etch D-I. But people still want (and have successfully) install sarge
on their systems. Both by using sarge base completly and switching to
sarge after base.
The only trick is to add backports for the kernel install or to
manualy install a new kernel before the first reboot. Maybe there
could be a choice to use the kernel from the CD but still get stable
base from the net?
>> The case that was not covered is when the mirror _is_ there, but does not
>> cover the architecture. debootstrap would be started and would fail when
>> it cannot untar basefiles or something like that (#353556).
>> And, of course, once debootstrap is started it's kind of too late to offer
>> an alternative mirror.
>
> Right, which you fixed in choose-mirror 1.21.
If the architecture is not covered then there should be no Release
file or Packages file. How does it ever get to the stage of unpacking
debs?
>> > The nice thing about re-invoking choose-mirror on failure is that it
>> > lets the installer cleanly recover from issues such as a mirror dying
>> > in the middle of the install, or choose-mirror not noticing that a
>> > mirror is actually broken. apt-setup also does this.
>>
>> Hmm. You would have to be able to diagnose that it is a failing mirror
>> though. When selecting a mirror or checking a sources.list that is easy
>> enough, but when debootstrap dies while downloading packages there could
>> be loads of causes for the failure.
>
> Right, in practice, if you try a bunch of other mirrors and they're all
> failing, you give up, or look at the logs, or something. :-)
Worse if it fails when unpacking stuff. Last I checked you have to
reformat the filesystem (or manualy cleanup) to retry.
MfG
Goswin
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