boot-floppies / CD

[Martin Oldfield <m@mail.tc>]

I recently blew a hamm CD from a slightly tweaked version of the
debian_cd package. Most of it worked well, it booted the machine and
the installation was easy. However, I had to tell the machine several
times during installation where to get things from. Whilst I
appreciate that this makes sense for a floppy based install (and perhaps
for some perverse CD installs), I think in general it makes things
confusing and annoying. 

At the risk of wading into the installation for newbies war can I
check that this is the standard behaviour of the CD ? If it is then I
suggest that it be changed. Explicitly:

1. If it's easy to find out where the CD is (e.g. /dev/hdc), then we
   either don't prompt at all, or prompt with a default.

2. Having decided where the CD is, we store it somewhere so that
   subsequent screens e.g. `where is the base system ?', don't have to 
   ask. 

3. It would be nice if dselect/apt were pointed at the CD device by
   default. Again it might be sensible to ask the user if he wants
   this to happen before we do this.

Given that the CD's location is fairly ephemeral, does it make sense
to write it in a well established place in /tmp ? Then the install
scripts for dselect and apt can look there, and if the file exists
take advantage of it. 

It would probably be nice to search the first few levels of the disc
to find the debian archive automatically without relying on a
particular disc structure. Is there any code lying around which one
can point at a directory tree and will find any debian archives in the 
n levels below it ?

I'm happy to work on the problem, but before I start I'd like to know
if this makes any sense at all.

Cheers,
-- 
Martin Oldfield.


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