Hi!
Here are the minutes from the Debian Installer meeting held on IRC two
days ago. A copy of these minutes is available online [1], as well as
the full IRC log [2].
[1] http://people.debian.org/~lunar/d-i/irc-meeting-20070926/minutes
[2] http://people.debian.org/~lunar/d-i/irc-meeting-20070926/log
The next meeting has been arbitrarily scheduled to Wednesday, October
31th at 20:00 UTC. Please raise your voice if that does not fit within
your game^Wlife.
--- 8< ---
Debian Installer team meeting number 15 has been held from 20:00 UTC to
21:50 UTC on Wednesday September 26th 2007 on #debian-boot@irc.debian.org.
11 people spoke at least once during the meeting.
The full log of the meeting is available at
http://people.debian.org/~lunar/d-i/irc-meeting-20070926/log
busybox and mklibs updates
--------------------------
The upstream version of busybox currently in the archive is the same as
in Etch. Getting an updated version means various benefits for
debian-installer (for example, its dhcp client looks like a viable
alternative to the fat dhcp3).
Bastian did an update to version 1.6 that is currently available in its
private branch in the d-i repository. It was not uploaded at that time
due to a few unresolved issues. His plan is to move directly to the new
1.7 branch, but as it might break things, this will not be done before
beta1 is released.
This new busybox will remove "ifconfig" and add the often requested
"ping". "ifconfig" is still currently in use by ppp-udeb, but Jérémy
Bobbio proposed a yet-to-be-tested patch to solve this issue.
mklibs was stripping needed symbols when librairies had multiple version
of the same symbol (#433874). This made the daily builds unusable on a
few architectures for quite some time now. Thanks to the effort of Joey
Hess and Bastian Blank, and after a few linking issues in other packages
detected and solved, the problem should become history this weekend.
mklibs was also preventing the recent improvements to cdebconf proposed
by Jérémy Bobbio from being integrated. This should be solved this
week-end as well with the addition of a new command-line option.
d-i beta1 release
-----------------
One blocker that should be resolved in a few days is the migration to
Linux 2.6.22. linux-modules-extra-2.6 has finally been uploaded and the
kernel should migrate to testing soon. Otavio Salvador will take care
of the transition after that.
Sparc kernels are still broken (#433187). We agreed to release the
beta1 anyway if a fix has not been found before.
Jérémy Bobbio was waiting for the mklibs issue to be solved before
merging his work on cdebconf. Both should now happen in a short while.
Frans Pop mentioned a few remaining serious issues with partman and LVM
(#425829 and #425840) that will be looked into by David Härdeman and
eventually Jérémy Bobbio.
Otavio and Jérémy will work together on solving the problem in debian-cd
which creates oversized netinst CD images.
See also:
* http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/StatusUpdate
* http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Today
Preparation of etch r2
----------------------
Jérémy Bobbio has been working on getting an updated installer for the
next Etch point release. What has currently been done:
* cdebconf/0.114etch1 has been uploaded and accepted - improving memory usage,
* grub-installer/1.22etch1 has been uploaded - fixing serial console issues,
* libdebian-installer/0.50etch1 has been uploaded - fixes SGI O2 detection,
* partman-crypto/20etch1 has been uploaded - fixing loop-aes on hd-media,
* uswsusp/0.3~cvs20060928-7etch1 has been uploaded - fixing the misleading
warning about swap.
What is left to be done:
* debconf: Colin Watson did not have the time to take care of the
upload yet. Jérémy requested commit access to the debconf Alioth
project to do it himself.
* kernel: Dann Frazier is going to uploaded a -15 with the security
fixes merged, there will be no ABI update. Once he will sent his
signal, Jérémy will take care of the massbuilds.
* choose-mirror: will probably need to be updated
* debian-installer: Frans Pop gave the necessary instructions on how to
make a stable upload. It is necessary to coordinate with the SRM and
ftpmasters in order to make everything smooth.
A summary has been sent to the Stable Release Managers [1] since the meeting
happened.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2007/09/msg00233.html
discover-pkginstall
-------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen recently added to discover the ability to map hardware to
Debian packages and added support to build out-of-tree kernel modules with
module-assistant when needed.
All that is needed is to run the "discover-pkginstall" script as root.
It will display a list of detected packages and allow the user to
choose which packages should be installed. This includes
RAID controller tools, wireless drivers, USB camera drivers and others.
Petter asked everyone to give it a try, in the hope to improve the
script and database.
It would be a nice addition to add this directly to the
debian-installer, probably in the hw-detect package, through a script in
finish-install.d or post-base-installer.d.
Jérémy Bobbio mentioned that an extra question during default
installations should probably be avoided. Petter answered that every
packages installed should be "safe" and could be installed by default.
Another issue raised by Otavio Salvador was about the out-of-tree kernel
modules. Desktop users may not actually want to bloat their system with
a building environment, and out-of-tree modules are built for kernel
versions in stable and testing. discover-pkginstall should install
these binary packages directly.
The last remark was about the GUI tools that discover-pkginstall could
install. It should somehow integrate with tasksel to be aware of the
user prefered desktop environment and install the necessary packages
depending on that.
The integration of discover-pkginstall will be done after beta1 if
everything else is ready.
New look for README.html
------------------------
As seen on the debian-boot mailling-list [2], the new look for
README.html that was proposed by Kalle Söderman [3] has been integrated
to debian-cd by Steve McIntyre and Jérémy Bobbio.
Kalle also made a new look for the README.mirrors [4], but this would
mean changes in webwml that would be harder to get in.
Now that win32-loader asks for a language before displaying the README,
it probably makes more sense now to add it to the translators lists.
Nicolas François will look on how po4a could be used to do it properly.
A side effect of this changes is that the content of the README is
getting more attention. Discussions are still going on the debian-boot
mailling-list about the necessary improvements.
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2007/09/msg00690.html
[3] http://kjs.homeip.net/projects/debian/debinstall/README
[4] http://kjs.homeip.net/projects/debian/debinstall/README.mirrors
partman-crypto
--------------
David Härdeman is still alive. :) He is trying to stay up-to-date on
the bugs affecting partman-crypto but he is currently quite swamped into
his studies.
He still would like to work on at least:
* multi-disk support,
* storage of crypto keys on USB sticks.
Jérémy Bobbio reminded that partman-crypto was one of the killer
features of the Debian Installer as no other distributions currently
offer encrypted root disks directly in their installer.
Currently, partman-crypto can't be used with the graphical version of
the installer due to a missing GTK+ entropy plugin. Jérémy has written
the code which has yet to be merged. He will coordinate with Max
Vozeler, its original author, to do it.
"align" capability for the graphical installer
----------------------------------------------
Jérémy has been trying to add support for "columns" or "aligned" select
question handlers for the graphical installer, following Anton's
proposal [5]. It has provided a screenshot showing how far he currently
went [6].
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2007/07/msg00723.html
[6] http://people.debian.org/~lunar/cdebconf-align-localechooser.png
It is currently implemented as a plugin, using "$$" to separate columns.
Using this feature would then mean, it seems, quite a lot of changes
throughout the installer to use it.
He asked about the possibility to instead automatically parse the actual
templates for successions of whitespaces to automatically find the
columns.
The consensus was that doing so is too risky, and that it would be way
better to add "align" support as a new capability, extending the debconf
protocol and modifying every frontends. This means a lot more work, but
Jérémy committed to do it.
Postponed to the next meeting
-----------------------------
* Status of lowmem and recent cdebconf improvements
* Make d-i support nfsroot systems (#441291)
* Need an option of memtest86+ on the install CD
* Future of localization-config
* Results of the D-I team members poll: what to do with these results?
--- >8 ---
Thanks to tbm for proofreading the minutes.
Cheers,
--
Jérémy Bobbio .''`.
lunar@debian.org : :Ⓐ : # apt-get install anarchism
`. `'`
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