El Wed, Dec 29, 2004 at 09:22:42AM +0800, Niall Young va escriure: > On Thu, 23 Dec 2004, Andreas Tille wrote: [...] > What I'm saying is that FAI, CDD and debian-installer are all trying > to solve the same basic problem. Why not work together? Why > duplicate effort, not just in the implementation but in the concepts and > process flow? FAI has done a lot of groundwork, it would be a good idea > to see what they've learnt and take advantage of this knowledge instead > of repeating the same mistakes. At the very least, I'd work with FAI to > combine the FAI class and CDD meta-data concepts so that both projects > benefit from such an easy win. Concentrate on defining and packaging > the meta-data, and leave installation to FAI for now. Just get it > installing to a local chroot. Then I'd be looking at debian-installer > and investigating what's required to port all of FAI's functionality to > it, I believe most of the hooks are already there, and a single keypress > installation proof of concept has already been built. Maybe use udebs > for your CDD meta-data. You have convinced me in that I have to review how FAI works; I've never used it and only took a look at it a long time ago, but with your comments I'm sure I want to review it; if what you say is true I'm sure that the proposed CDD Tool and FAI can be used together simply making FAI input files another output format for the CDD description. I only have started to work on the CDDTool and my initial idea is to have a common CDD definition format and a parsing tool for it that can generate different output files, that should be fast to do, but real life issues have slowed down the initial development. Anyway I'm working on it and I'll try to have something soon to start playing. > I've thought about all of this a LOT over the last 2-3 years while > implementing fai-bootcd and building a large, national network of > "custom debian distributions". So I'm hoping that someone with time > is reading this and can see these and other commonalities across Debian > projects. As I've said many times, I don't want to duplicate effort and in fact my CDDTool proposal was done while trying to use existing tools to build a CDD, the idea is to reuse as much as possible and learn from others; now I know that FAI is another knowledge source and I will use it. > Why am I not doing this myself? I simply haven't had the time. But > the logical place for all of this is with the debian-installer - allow > Debian GNU/Linux to have non-interactive installation of any CDD out of > the box. A CDD description could reside on a floppy or USB keyring, and > you could install it with any Official CD. Everyone wins! They could > even replace the old task packages, and some of the most popular CDDs > could be on the Official CD. Well, the idea is to have a debian-installer output for the CDD description, once we know that it works we can try to integrate CDD support into the debian-installer, but right now is easier to use it as is. > Just don't go down your own path, alone. Work together. Combine > resources and build a common standard, then aim for a stable sid release. > This advice is all I can really offer to the project at the moment. Well, this list and the people involved is interested in working together and with Debian, I don't see any problem with that, maybe the only one is the lack of time. -- Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@debian.org> <http://people.debian.org/~sto/> Key fingerprint = 29DF 544F 1BD9 548C 8F15 86EF 6770 052B B8C1 FA69
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