Re: Speeding up install and other questions
* Phillip Susi <psusi@ubuntu.com> [130215 22:18]:
> In the debootstrap case, it is meant to be able to be run from a
> foreign system, so the manual extraction makes sense, but for the
> normal installer, it already has a functioning dpkg on the installer
> system, and it can be passed --root= to point it to the target rather
> than being run from the target in a chroot, so why not skip the
> extract phase and do this instead?
The problem is the essential packages. Everything is assumed the
essential packages are at least unpackaged, so they have to be
there already. It does not help that Debian lumps to different
things together in Essential (namely packages that have to be
available always and packages that should not be installed without
good consideration), so that a far too large set of packages
is Essential or pseudo-Essential, so things like mount get this
double unpackaging (and increase the size of every chroot) without
any objective need.
It might be nice if those Essential packages and their dependencies
could at least been unpacked by dpkg, but trying that is not possible
due to pre-Depends (as some Essential packages may have them and dpkg
will not unpack without them). Perhaps in that regard it would help
if dpkg had a mode to allow (pseudo-)Essential packages to be unpacked
without considering pre-depends by some to be added command....
When speaking about the "normal installer" that already has a dpkg
available, are you speaking about the Ubuntu installer? (I think in
the Debian installer, you do not have one).
Bernhard R. Link
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