Hi, On 06.06.25 06:38, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
If you're doing this offline, then you probably ought to also be generating the other DVD images anyway to take with you to your desert island in order to prove that Debian's desert island test remains valid.
Yes, the problem isn't so much "having the media" as "having to swap the media." The solution proposed by the question asker is wrong, but the proper solution would require support during image generation.
Right now, if you have all 50 or so DVDs, a fully offline installation requires you to present all of them to the installer, in turn, before installation starts, so 50 disc changes. Then, if you do a default installation, you only need disc 1, and feel a bit silly for doing the entire dance before.
Problem is, there is also no way for the user to know which discs are needed before package selection, and the person asking the question had installations fail because they assumed they could get away with only adding the first three discs, but on that particular machine, a package from a later disc was required. We don't give out guidance like "if you need xfce, you also need disc 3 and 4", for good reasons, but it means that airgapped installations are very cumbersome.
So if disc 1 also had the indexes available for the other discs, we could simply ask "which installer discs do you have available?" (comma separated list of ranges), add their indexes from that prompt, and then ask only for the required ones during installation. The user will still need to prepare all of them if they need the guarantee that they will be able to complete an installation, but at least the number of disc swaps will be greatly reduced.
Simon
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