Re: Questions regarding the base system
On Thu, 10 Oct 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
bruce>It's nice to have the root mail directed to the proper place as soon as
bruce>the system is activated, since many daemons send mail. It would be fine
bruce>to write a small C or shell program to perform this operation if Perl is
bruce>too much. However, please don't delete this feature.
Then there should be some kind of mail package that has a priority in
installation and when installed sends the mail.
bruce>***We also need Perl for dpkg-ftp, unless we rewrite _that_ in C***
Ok.
bruce>> If possible I would like the base system to be that small that it can be
bruce>> included on the root system. I can make the root system about 2 Megabytes
bruce>> big I guess if loading is performed by loadlin.
bruce>
bruce>This is solely limited by the memory in your computer. I don't think it's
bruce>practical to make the base much smaller than it is now (4+MB compressed),
bruce>but you can have that be part of the root system if you have 10MB RAM. For
bruce>smaller systems, we should continue to mount a disk and read the base from
bruce>it. 4MB systems can barely boot right now without a swap partition - 2MB
bruce>more in the ramdisk will not work for them.
The limit on kernel RAMDISKS is 4 MB per default. That means a maximum of
2 MB compressed size. I cannot have the base.tar.gz in the root if it
stays that big.
bruce>> Could we perhaps set up a bootstrapping base? There should be a minimal
bruce>> base installed whose only purpose it is to access some archive on a CD /
bruce>> Harddisk or network and then it should install step by step more
bruce>> functionality.
bruce>
bruce>This is what the floppy root does. Rather than transfer the floppy root to
bruce>the hard disk, it makes more sense for the floppy root to transfer the base
bruce>archive, whatever size it is, to the hard disk. This means that the floppy
bruce>root should be able to load the base from a CD, a hard disk, floppies, or
bruce>over the network and read it to the hard disk. Note that the Unix tools
bruce>on the floppy are not the normal ones - they are tiny ones that I wrote,
bruce>and the libc on the floppy is chopped down to contain only what those tools
bruce>need.
The base system is an extra step that I would like to circumvent somehow.
Loading the base system means extra functionality apart from dpkg to
locate a file somewhere out there and put it on. I would rather have the
root floopy contain dpkg and minimal tools to directly start installing
packages. That will only work if there is a set of packages that have to
be installed first and those packages can only depend on functionality
less than the base system.
This is just for the future. Dont worry the first release will be
compatible with the common scheme just having a combined boot/rootdisk.
bruce>The current base is just enough to get the user logged in, to make it
bruce>possible for packages to install, and to get dselect running over the
bruce>network.
I would say the current base contains too much extra stuff. Lets strip it
down and if possible have dpkg in on the installation root installing
packages. That way you can completely configure a system with the
installation disks and also do rescue operations.
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