Boot floppy creation package uploaded

[bruce@beagle.pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

I am currently uploading the boot-floppies-0.93.6-0 package.

This package extracts into /usr/src/boot-floppies-0.93.6 .
In that directory, it creates the scripts bootdisk.sh and basedisks.sh .
If you run those scripts with no arguments, they will tell you what
arguments they need. The scripts are capable of creating boot and base
disks of any size (although the boot disk contents probably won't fit
on anything smaller than a 1200K disk). 

You should have a current mirror of the base and devel packages and
the Packages file on your system, organized in the same manner as on
our FTP site. You will also need a copy of SysLinux 1.20 .  Be sure
my base-0.93.6-0.deb package is in your mirror (it's currently in
pre-release, I think, and will have to be moved to binary/base).

You can not have two files for the same package in your mirror - this
will bite you if you have image-1.2.13 and image-1.3.25 - remove the
one you don't want to use.

The new base disks are a binary-split gzipped tar archive with a 512-byte
header on each disk. If you strip off the headers and cat the three disks
together, you should be able to feed the result to "tar xzlf -". There is
a program that prompts for disks, verifies their contents, and combines them.
That program is called floppy_merge. It lives with its companion floppy_split
in /usr/src/boot-floppies-0.93.6/utilities .

IAN MURDOCK: The directory /usr/src/boot-floppies-0.93.6/utilities contains
the floppy_merge command, which goes on the root disk. To extract the base,
run the command:

	floppy_merge $device | gunzip | (cd /root; cpio --format=ustar -di)

This will do all of the prompting for disks, invocation of fdflush, etc.
Isn't it interesting how "cpio" knows how to extract "tar" files :-) .
In this case it's used because "tar" is bigger than "cpio" and we
are out of space on the root floppy. I use the tar format because it
compresses down a bit smaller than the cpio format. Also, I may use my
tar-in-a-function to extract the base system in some later release.

The only part of Debian that now needs to be created manually, to some extent,
is the root disk of the installation set. I'll try to address this with Ian
for a later release.

	Thanks

	Bruce

Date:  Wed Sep 13 11:18:36 PDT 1995
Package:  boot-floppies
Version:  0.93.6-0
Description:  Scripts to create the Debian installation floppy set.
Priority: high for distribution creators, low for everyone else.
Changes: Created.
# File: <name> <size> <md5sum> <destination>
File: boot-floppies-0.93.6-0.deb 14108 36c398f5a2fcd37e7b4387689cc52ea1 binary/devel
File: boot-floppies-0.93.6-0.tar.gz 9247 65cfcdc3ad53bb13ce6cee62434be7a1 source/devel
File: 1440_base_floppy-1 1474560 27e1a883f84fda58658e13775e9e2c77 disks
File: 1440_base_floppy-2 1474560 2ea707c57bb16a83df70b520428bf8bb disks
File: 1440_base_floppy-3 1063424 9e571621e3dae5cef689f91f1d20c0cf disks
File: 1440_boot_floppy.gz 791176 19b4d54cc719d89d8d3f7ba81463df45 disks