Hi Eduard,
Given that you say, quite rightly, that it's pretty easy to generate
tarballs:
Eduard - Gabriel Munteanu <edgmnt@gmail.com> writes:
...
> Generating them can be quite straightforward, and doesn't even require
> root privileges:
> $ cdebootstrap --foreign --arch=ARCH [...]
> $ tar [...]
I'd suggest users would be better served learning to do that.
Especially if they plan to do any of the more complicated things you're
talking about.
We used to have a tarball that one could just drop onto a system (until
about 15 years ago IIRC) but it wasn't a very good solution, and you get
left with the job of doing all the bits that d-i does for you now to
make sure the result boots, and that the network works etc.
Anyone that can deal with those issues after installing a tarball should
have no trouble at all running {c}debootstrap themselves.
Might I suggest that if you have concrete examples of things that
you mention, like:
> - custom setups unsupported by the Debian Installer
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.
Certainly, for example, some multi-layered RAID/lvm/crypto setups are
rather difficult to arrange in an automated way in debian-installer, but
I see nothing in your suggestion that is going to address that weak
spot. Instead you're wanting to have nothing at all to handle the
partitioning. I presume you're expecting people to do all that by other
means, in which case they should probably just use {c}debootstrap
directly onto the mounted partitions they just created.
For someone that has such a complicated setup, it seems unlikely that
they are going to best served by a tarball created with a different
setup in mind. They are liable to find that they need to spend more
time kludging round the bits where the assumptions embodied by the
tarball don't fit their needs properly.
It would almost certainly be much better for them to use and understand
deboostrap directly, in which case they could build their own tarballs
if it suits their purpose. Alternatively they could use and understand
debian-installer preseeding, if that suits them better.
Cheers, Phil.
--
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