Otavio and I discussed this privately on IRC yesterday and I was able to better articulate my reasons against the current patch. Basically I don't think that CDDs should rely on preseeding to customize the installer so fundamentally at run-time. If such customizing is needed (and I do agree that this does look very useful), then it should be done at build time by including files into the initrd. Preseeding is primarily a functionality aimed at users and CDDs should not take away the freedom of users to use preseeding by using it for their own purposes. I also feel that this level of hacking is too fundamental to support in preseeding. If anyone wants to manipulate the base system, he is effectively creating a custom distribution and should thus be able to build his own images. It is also far more suitable to document this in SVN for the build system than in the installation guide. On Tuesday 15 August 2006 13:50, Otavio Salvador wrote: > > I can understand the desire for a specific debootstrap script, but I > > feel adding support for _preseeding_ INCLUDES and EXCLUDES is > > redundant, especially when targeted at CDDs: > > - CDDs should be able to use the include and exclude files instead of > > preseeding; > > That forces them to use CD installation. No, I don't agree with that. The files could be included at build time in any initrd; the EXTRAFILES variable already allows this, but I can even see extending the build system for this. We'd just need to define a standard location for these files, something like /var/lib/debootstrap/. The base-installer script should still check if an base_include or base_exclude file exists in /cdrom/.disk/, and if it does, copy that over any file included in the initrd (effectively overruling it). > > For the debootstrap script, I wonder if that really needs to be > > preseedable or if it would be better to have base-installer look for > > a script with a fixed name in a fixed place. It is only really of use > > to people who will probably already be creating their own images. > > I didn't see what you mean here. What I meant is that this also should work by reading from a file in the initrd (also in /var/lib/debootstrap/) instead of preseeding it.
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