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Re: Making netinst CDs Not Suck



On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 09:24:15PM +0200, Martin Sj?gren wrote:
> tor 2003-03-27 klockan 20.26 skrev Raphael Hertzog:
> > Le Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 11:05:44AM +0000, Alastair McKinstry ?crivait:
> > > > I don't know how to fix 2, but one idea I had for fixing 1 was to have
> > > > overrides in the netinst CD building, so ethdetect and friends would be
> > > > normally optional, but when put on a netinst CD, they'd be overridden to
> > > > standard. buxy, however, didn't really like this and suggested a file on
> > > > the CD-ROM with a list of packages to be installed automatically.
> > > Why didn't buxy like it?
> > Because "overrides" are not supposed to change for each CD.

For what it's worth, this is very similar to one aspect of Bdale's
"flavours" idea. Basically, the thought there is that Debian should just
have its regular overrides, but a particular flavours will change the
priorities of a particular set of packages.

What we were looking at there, in the end, was having an extra set of
"flavour override" files that you could select amongst, that would limit
the number of packages you viewed in dselect, and raise certain packages
to standard (from optional) or optional (from extra - in the case where
if you're using a particular flavour, you know you'll need a particular
obscure package), and so on.

For a complete CD set, you'd want some UI to select your flavour; for
specialised CDs, you'd want to have a default flavour preselected.

Thinking along those lines, probably with "flavours" like "install from
CD, and ask about using the network too", and "install purely from the
network", might be worthwhile.

> > not meant to change depending on the architecture (like you suggest for
> > the keymaps).

Also, we already need to be able to have arch-specific overrides for
things like gcc-2.96 on ia64 for woody -- it ought to be standard on ia64
since gcc on ia64 depends on it, but shouldn't be standard anywhere else.
The plan is to use the extra overrides file for this, but apt-ftparchive
doesn't support it yet.

FWIW, etc.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

  ``Dear Anthony Towns: [...] Congratulations -- 
        you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified Engineer!''

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