Re: Multi-arch netinst getting too big

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 07:16:59AM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
>On Mon, 2010-06-28 at 22:43 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>> 
>> I don't think sym-links are going to work - the filesystem code in
>> isolinux is very simple (e.g. it only supports basic 8.3 filenames!)
>> and I doubt it'll work. Hard links *might*, however. 
>
>OK, that's a one character change...
>
>The files under install.{486,amd}/xen/ don't need to be readable by
>isolinux, only by the xen tools. I've just had a quick look and they
>appear to support hardlinks but not symlinks so that's another argument
>for hardlinks. If we think isolinux would be a problem then we could
>restrict this to files under install.*/xen/.
>
>Ian.
>---
>Subject: boot-x86: detect duplicates in the extra images used for installation
>
>Several files included under install.{386,amd} are actually identical to
>others. Rather than duplicating them attempt to detect this and hardlink
>them.
>
>Since images can be downloaded from the web at build time it is not
>always possible to detect identical files by looking for the symlinks
>created by the debian-installer build. Instead we pass a list of
>potential "doppelgangers" to extra_image each of which is checked for
>similarity to the new image.
>
>I added gtk/vmlinuz (which is always the same as plain vmlinuz) which
>although not necessary makes it more explicit which kernel goes with the
>initrd at very little cost.
>
>Hardlinks are used in preference to symlinks since these are expected to
>work better with isolinux and the Xen tools.
>
>Signed-off-by: Ian Campbell <ijc@hellion.org.uk>
>
>diff --git a/tools/boot/squeeze/boot-x86 b/tools/boot/squeeze/boot-x86

Cool, applied now.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
"Every time you use Tcl, God kills a kitten." -- Malcolm Ray