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Re: partial fix for ISOLINUX_DEFAULT



On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:41:10PM +0100, Frans Pop wrote:
> On Thursday 25 December 2008, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> > looking at debian-cd svn, i noticed that there was a FIXME for
> > supporting ISOLINUX_DEFAULT.
> >
> > this very imperfect patch at the very least gets installgui working
> > with the menus, to make Graphical Install the default menu selection,
> > although it relies on text.cfg getting loaded before gtk.cfg:
> 
> I'm not really happy with this patch.

not surprising, really. i'm not much happy with it myself. thanks for
looking it over. :)

> 1) It's actual function seems extremely limited. Effectively it only moves 
> the default selection one line down.

yes. pretty much. allows a person to hit enter to get a graphical installer,
rather than having to think about which option to choose.

> 2) It does not really support multi-arch nor multi-desktop CD/DVDs.

> 3) It only works because I expect isolinux will use the last 'default' 
> statement it encounters, but having two default statements in a config 
> seems rather ugly to me.

agreed.

would it be any better if it removed the default entries from other
configs?

i haven't looked into it, but i'm guessing debian-installer is what generates
the isolinux configuration files? it might be better to re-work those a little
to make it easier to configure the default menu, as the current isolinux
configuration is a little difficult to customize.

the other idea i had was some way to change the order of config files, so that
the graphical installer would come up first. would still require a way to
remove the "menu default" entry from other options.

or if syslinux could be patched to allow a "menu default $FOO" outside of a
particular section...

> 4) It is indeed only a very partial fix.
> 
> What exactly is the use case this is trying to cover?
> Unless it is very persuasive I'd be inclined to remove this altogether...

in etch there was a way to make it default to the graphical installer.  it
doesn't seem unreasonable to want to make that the default behavior on a custom
CD.

now that there's a menu by default, it's easier to select the graphical
installer, so maybe it's not as big of a deal to remove support for it.

> > i'm also curious if there is there a planned timeline to upload
> > debian-cd to unstable soon?
> 
> We've just implemented the recent changes for daily/weekly builds and 
> everything seems to work. So I guess we could do a release. 

good to hear.

> That would allow you to also update simple-cdd.

ah, it seems you read my mind. :)

live well,
  vagrant


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