Hi Joey! On Sun, Jan 02, 2005 at 06:09:21PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote: >Before I throw anymore pennies down the well that is debian-cd, let me >make sure I understand how it's supposed to work vs. how people seem to >want it to work based on recent modifications. > >How it's supposed to work: > > - tasks/base-sarge is regenerated periodically by the code fragement given > at the top of the file, to track changes in debootstap > - tasks/debian-installer is generated by tools/generate_di_list, which > needs to run on a full debian mirror > - tasks/debian-installer+kernel likewise > - these tasks/ files, though machine generated, are kept in cvs for > ill-defined reasons, possibly because not everyone has a full mirror. > Whatever the reasons, keeping them in cvs seemed to lead to -- They should not be in cvs if this can cause confusion, I guess. >How it seems to really work: > > - tasks/base-sarge is never updated for new versions of debootstrap in > recent memory, but things like "filesutils", fileutils, and arcboot are > manually added to it, ignoring the comments at the top of the file. Ouch. In that case we need to fix this. Dependencies are going to become fun here, of course. I hadn't noticed the problem here yet, but I've never felt the need to modify tasks. > - tasks/debian-installer is generated by tools/generate_di_list, which > now must be run on a machine containing a mirror of the unofficial amd64 > port, or you won't get the same file as is in cvs. Apologies, that's my fault from when I added the amd64 support into debian-cd. > - tasks/debian-installer+kernel likewise but more so Ditto. >Is this accurate? Am I wasting my time trying to do things like the >documentation and common sense would indicate they should be done? I can well believe what you're seeing. The way I suggest to fix this: * remove the auto-generated files from cvs altogether: * tasks/base-sarge * tasks/debian-installer * tasks/debian-installer+kernel * Add a dependency on debootstrap to generate the base-$suite file as needed * A full debian-cd run should generate the tasks/debian-installer{,+kernel} as needed too. If people don't have a full mirror attached for the arches they're targetting then they're going to struggle to do anything anyway. It's not clear why these were ever committed into cvs, and I agree it was a mistake. Does this sound reasonable? The next question - do we want to do this _now_, or will it wait until after the sarge release so we don't risk destabilising too much? I guess I'm asking how much change we're likely to see in d-i between now and the release. Your call, really. What I'm planning on doing to debian-cd after sarge is released: * Merging in the JTE code to much improve jigdo generation performance * Doing some much-needed Makefile/script cleanups * Checking amd64 support properly (i.e. as soon as amd64 hits the real archive) * Putting in effort to improve generation of *correctly* sized CD and DVD images - at the moment there's a *lot* of hand tuning needed when making official images to minimise the number of CDs/DVDs needed without going over-size * Better integration/working with other infrastructure packages: * d-i (you know all about this!) * apt-ftparchive (we could probably drive this better and use its in-built caching where possible) Maybe this lot could/should go on a wiki page somewhere to allow people to comment and/or add their own wishlist/todo items. Any comments so far? -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com There's no sensation to compare with this Suspended animation, A state of bliss
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