Yesterday Joey and I discussed the integration of the graphical installer
into the regular build system, and the result is below for wider
discussion and comments.
The below should be valid for both i386, but may need adjustment for
powerpc. Comments from Colin on that are very welcome.
- Using the font tarballs is OK for the short run, but now that we
are integrating g-i we really need to switch to using udebs.
This should be finished before the Etch RC1 release.
- We'll continue to produce separate cd, mini.iso and hd-media images;
creating netboot images seems less obvious because of the size of
the initrd.
- G-I images will only be built for 2.6 the kernel (as currently).
- The d-i images for CD will be included on all CD images (businesscard,
netinst and full CD).
- As there will be separate initrds for CD images, we'll also need
separate boot options. We're thinking of "install-gui" and "expert-gui".
Other suggestions welcome.
Including the g-i images on the netinst will mean that it will grow bigger
than its current "maximum" size of 110 MB. The 110 MB limit is set mostly
to allow installations from a 128 MB USB-stick (hd-media image + netinst
iso together must be smaller than the capacity of the USB stick).
As we feel it is important to have the graphical installer available on
all CD types, we propose to relax the current size limit. This will mean
that the default image for USB installations will become 256 MB instead
of 128 MB.
We'd prefer not let the netinst grow unnecessarily, but relaxing the size
limit means that we could also for example include both initramfs-tools
and yaird (current netinst images only have one, not both).
We will probably also have to make space on the full CDs to prevent
packages needed for the basic tasks overflowing to the 2nd CD.
The best solution seems to be to move the installation guide to the 2nd
CD, possibly keeping only the English version on the first CD. This will
probably be needed anyway because of the added space taken by the new
translations we'll have for Etch.
This will of course mean some changes in debian-cd and the README included
on the CD.
Cheers,
FJP
P.S. I've also updated the status page for G-I; please check:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/GUIToDo
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