Re: Would allowing preseed to be a tarball a good idea?

[Glen Huang <heyhgl@gmail.com>]

@Philip
> On Feb 16, 2022, at 5:48 PM, Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:
> 
> Glen Huang <heyhgl@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Currently, the preseed file needs to be a text file. I find it to be a
>> bit limiting, especially if you want to do some non-trivial scripting
>> in either early_command or late_command (let's call them runners).
>> There are basically four options to address it AFAIK:
> 
> You can do rather complicated stuff actually, as seen in my (somewhat
> rusty) example here:
> 
>  https://hands.com/d-i/

I learned a few tricks, thanks for sharing it.

I didn’t know about preseed/run, somehow missed it when reading the doc for the first time. It does #3 in a pretty elegant way, and with pressef_fetch, they basically allow me to treat the web server as a tarball.

@Geert
> On Feb 16, 2022, at 5:50 PM, Geert Stappers <stappers@stappers.nl> wrote:
> 
> The initrd of d-i can indeed be extended / appended.
> And in the "appendix" goes the desired extras. Then
> 
> d-i  preseed/early_commands  /myextras/early_script

If I’m not wrong, this requires repackaging the installer media?

---

I do still think a direct tarball support would be icing on the cake. You can upload it to some public service and maybe shorten the url and then directly use it, obviating the needs for setting up a web server. But I agree the current utilities provided by the installer already make things a breeze, so I wouldn’t complain. :)

Regards,
Glen