Bug#762392: Publish self-contained debootstrapped tarballs
Hi,
On Sun, 2014-09-21 at 21:46 +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
[snip]
> Anyone that can deal with those issues after installing a tarball should
> have no trouble at all running {c}debootstrap themselves.
What if {c}debootstrap isn't available in their environment? That's
specifically the case I was talking about.
I suppose we may consider distributing {c}debootstrap in a
distro-neutral, self-contained package, but I'm unsure how difficult
that is.
[snip]
> that you report bugs about those, with specific examples, because you
> may find that you've just not noticed the way in which such setups are
> supported, and will therefore find out that it is possible to do what
> you want, or you will highlight real weaknesses in the installer, which
> are then more likely to get fixed.
There seems to be a fundamental issue with d-i in the usecases I
mentioned: d-i is a bootable installer meant to run on the target
machine. This translates to a very roundabout way of doing stuff if
installation involves a host OS, e.g. you'll need to set up a full
networked environment with DHCP and HTTP servers just to serve a preseed
file, in a way that's not abstracted / hidden at all. Or you'll have to
remaster a CD image to insert or change a preseed file.
I think this stems from the fact Debian / d-i is not separating concerns
well enough; namely it's mixing up the following, in a rather ad-hoc
manner:
- interactive user interface
- bootable environment
- disk setup helpers
- bootstrapping (note how d-i assumes you want a fully installed and
bootable system, not just a chroot)
- configuration management
[snip]
Eduard
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