Re: [NEWS] status of boot-flopppies
> Moin Massimo Dal Zotto,
>
> Our CD started that we installed a debian system and asked it for
> selection. We put those files on a single CD (420MB) so our distribution
> is self consitent, even if its only a small selection of Potatos.
>
> We have tested this selection of Potatos to be usefull for initial
> installation, and we'll next test it to be usefull to upgrade older
> debian systems.
>
> > The goal of my proposal was to avoid unnecessary swapping of cd during the
> > apt configuration when installin from an official distribution or from a
> > "debian-compliant" (meaning still undefined) custom distribution.
>
> If we now want to send an update CD, that may contain lets say mozilla.m11.
> I should provide any libs and depencicies on that mozilla.m11 needs also on
> this update CD. So if somebody wants to update from mozilla.m9 (on our
> current CD) to mozilla.m11, he does not need anything but my update CD.
> Peter Ganten (peter@ganten.de) had written our script to walk the
> dpkg/status and collect any dependencies.
>
> Its imho quite easy for a single debian update CD to focus on a hand
> full of topics and to provide a consiten update for those topics. Any
> update CD should also contain a minimal complete update of basic
> packages. So there is no need to change debian to provide smoth update
> CDs, and its even impossible to provide smoth update CDs that asumes
> a changed Debian, as the change would perhaps become implemented after
> the initial system was installed.
>
> > As explained in my previous mail this could be done by storing all the apt
> > cdrom.lists in the first (boot) cd, so that apt can automatically copy those
> > files when installing from the first cdrom and ask to swap cd's only when
> > actually required to install packages from next cd's.
>
> this is fine for a multi CD installation, if you asume that somebody
> wants anything. Lets say somebody only wants one platform (e.g. i386 :-)
> so he'll have around 3 CDs, if no package is on more than one CD or
> 4 CDs, if any CD is self consistent. For the first installation the
> 3 CD version (like standard debian) certainly has advantage, but on
> the long run self consistend CDs are easier to handle, imho.
Your proposal of self-consistent single cd is interesting but IMHO it is
applicable only to updates of an already installed distribution or to a
small distribution which can be fitted on a single cd.
My discussion was mainly about the official Debian distribution, also if
all my experiments have been made on a single cd distribution like yours.
The next full distribution will be 3 or 4 cd and we can't make assumptions
on which packages the user wants to install, so having self-consistent cd
can be difficult to achieve and probably not very useful for general use
as the user will need anyway to insert at least 2 or 3 cd.
Your idea can be interesting if we want to make periodical updates for
security fixes or major components upgrades. In this case the update cd
could be bootable and contain also the apt lists of all previous cd's.
In this way it could be used for upgrade and for first installation of
the updated distribution.
--
Massimo Dal Zotto
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