Bug#283600: RC2 succeeded; unhelpful error message
On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 01:54:43PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Jack Carroll wrote:
> > Supplement the "DEBOOTSTRAP ERROR" message with something like
> > "Go back, and start the Base System install again, or select a faster
> > mirror."
> > This simple hint could greatly reduce frustration for a Debian newbie.
> >
> > Similar advice would be desirable if downloading times out during
> > "Loading components of the Debian Installer".
>
> Actually a download failure during loading of d-i components behaves
> much better: it lets you know there was a download problem, and allows
> you to retry that download, or even change your mirror in the middle of
> the download.
>
> Adding that degree of polish to the deboostrap stage is harder, since
> debootstrap does the downloading on its own and communicates errors to
> us over a fairly limited channel.
With the improvements in debootstrap 1.0.39, I think this might actually
be feasible nowadays, albeit in an imperfect way. If any .debs fail to
download, then debootstrap will now exit at the end of the retrieval
phase rather than bulling on regardless and hoping that it will manage
to succeed anyway. If you run debootstrap again, then it will download
fresh index files, but otherwise it will reuse any .debs it finds in the
target directory that validate correctly. So we can't retry an
individual download as such, but we can get pretty close to it.
This should, I think, open the way for a dialog much as in net-retriever
(so we could perhaps even share translations). For the record,
net-retriever's version looks like this, modulo rendering:
The installer failed to download a file from the mirror. This may be
a problem with your network, or with the mirror. You can choose to
retry the download, select a different mirror, or cancel and choose
another installation method.
Downloading a file failed:
Retry
Change mirror
Cancel
The main trick will be telling the difference between a retrieval
failure and some other kind. base-installer already knows about the
specific names of debootstrap errors, so it doesn't seem out of the
question for it to handle some of them differently. Do you think it
would be OK to special-case the COULDNTDL and COULDNTDLPKGS errors,
possibly in run-debootstrap.c, and send those off into a special code
path that offers this menu?
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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