Re: [NEWS] status of boot-flopppies
> There could be at least three possibilities:
> 1. Some Packages.this.cd or something
> 2. Packages.all.cd or something
> 3. Special note at all packages like "OnThisCD: TRUE || FALSE"
>
> And if there is a cut distro (like Linux Expo) then the Packages.cd
> should be modified
As emerged from recent discussions Packages.cd should not be necessary in
the future distributions becuse it is used only by dpkg. If we use apt-get
this file should not be needed, but all the discussions still applies to
the apt cdrom.lists files, whic contain the same information splitted in
more files on a directory basis.
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.
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 doesn't add significant new features to the installation but makes it
easier, specially for the beginner which doesn't know how debian and the cd
are organized. On the other hand it doesn't seem to require much effort to
the cd makers, while offering an overall better product.
The cdroms.lists should describe all the official cd's (main, contrib, nonUS,
nonfree, ecc.) also if some of the cd (for example nonUS) are not always
available from certain sites or distribution. Individual cd's can obviously
be ignored by removing the corresponding lines from the sources.list also
if the corrisponding cdrom list is still available.
If one makes his own distribution he will just create the cdrom.lists files
for all cd's included in his distribution (debian, nonUS, custom, ecc.) and
place them in his own boot cd. This could still require swapping from his
boot cd to the debian main cd, but this is still better than having always
to insert manually all the cd even when installing an official debian.
A Linux Expo distribution will obviously fall in this case, but we could also
distribute only the first cd and tell the user to buy, borrow, download the
others or use http for the missing parts. It is just a matter of re-running
the apt-configurator and ignore the default sources.list of the cd.
So my proposal is that the official distribution should contain those files
and a preconfigured sources.list for all the official cdroms, and custom
distribution are encouraged (but not strictly required) to follow this
guidelines. The absence of those files will obviously require that the user
run apt-cdrom manually on all the cd's.
--
Massimo Dal Zotto
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| Massimo Dal Zotto email: dz@cs.unitn.it |
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