On Wed, Sep 16, 1998 at 01:11:33PM +1000, Tyson Dowd wrote:
> > > All right, I am REALLY becoming annoyed at seeing this.
> > >
> > > Infomagic, Cheapbytes, and LSL have all managed to over the small course of
> > > Debian history that I am personally aware of totally SCREW UP the Debian CDs
> > > and call them "Official" anyway. And it's just them that I know about!
> > > This is EXTREMELY frustrating.
> > I've used LSL's Bo and Cheapbytes Hamm CDs and had no problems. When it came
> > to dselect and the dist. directories, I just switched to another terminal and
> > logged in to look....
>
> May I suggest that there be an official file on the CD which simply
> gives the location of the relevant Packages files on that CD,
> and a description of each one. This file should live on the root
> directory of the CD, and have a standard name.
THIS is an excellent idea, though I am probably going to suggest a couple
things that might break dselect without apt be done with it.. =< I think
you might like the ideas though, they will generally be helpful.
Then again, it might be worthwhile to make it (dselect and methods) support
this too, it'll be faster and easier for people to handle or make sub
distributions of, designed to fit a zip disk or whatever. (This would make
me happy because it would greatly simplify my zip project--which has NOT
been abandoned, just put on hold a little while till someone versed in
initrd's can help with the design)
> Installation tools can parse this file, and present the user with a
> list of possibilities. For example:
>
> CD Label: Vendor Y Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 Disk 3
>
> Packages: debian/hamm/contrib/binary-i386/Packages
> Description: Packages from the contrib section of Debian 2.0
> These packages ... blah blah blah.
>
> Packages: debian/hamm/non-US/binary-i386/Packages
> Description: Packages from the non-US section of Debian 2.0
> These packages ... blah blah blah.
>
> Packages: extras/binary-i386/Packages
> Description: Vendor YYY packages, including product X.
> Product X .... blah blah blah.
I was thinking more like ...
----8<-----------------
CD-Label: Cheap*Bytes Debian GNU/Linux v2.0 (hamm) Disc 1
Vendor: CheapBytes
# P.O. Box 2714 Fax: (209) 367-8518
# Lodi, CA 95241 Email: sales@cheapbytes.com
# U.S.A. URI: http://www.cheapbytes.com
# This stuff is not actually used anywhere, just handy for vendors to put
Version: 2.0 (hamm)
Alt-CD: Cheap*Bytes Debian GNU/Linux v2.0 (hamm) Disc 2
Alt-CD: Cheap*Bytes Debian GNU/Linux v2.0 (hamm) Disc 3
Distribution: main debian/dists/hamm/main
Description: whatever
Archs: binary-i386 binary-all
Sections: admin ....
.... web
Distribution: ......
:
:
----8<-----------------
And then there's the package files... I suggest doing that just a LITTLE
differently...
in the main dist above, you'd have things like..
debian/dists/hamm/main/pkg-lists/Packages-admin_binary-i386.gz
Seeing my idea in print, it needs refining, but this would allow us to break
up dists into multiple CDs the way we had to break source up for hamm. It
would ALSO allow us to have non-CD distributions.. Zip disks, Shark disks,
anything in theory big enough to hold the biggest section you want to
include. That's another thing, you wouldn't have to include ALL sections
this way if you were making something like a Zip disk and wanted to keep it
down to a minimum of what you'd actually need.
I was hoping the above would do that, but it's really too unrefined to be a
solution now. Refinements welcome.
> Insert a CD, ask apt to scan it, and it will present a list
> of package lists, you select the ones you want to add to your sources,
> it will add them, and when you want to install them, it will prompt
> you to insert the CDROM labeled "Vendor Y Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 Disk 3".
>
> This allows us to provide "update" CDs, specialized distribution CDs,
> add-ons, and have a management system (you can even remove sources at a
> later date if you no longer have the CD).
>
> FTP sites and the like can be handled in much the same way.
Was hoping to expand that to partial mirrors, partial/minimal distributions,
etc. I find the giant Packages.gz file for main kinda annoying if all I
wanna see is if there's a new <whatever> yet. Or for example, I could care
less the contents of games sections..
> (This system is kind of similar to the Windows driver installation
> system, although hopefully we can avoid the constant "where is your
> Win95 CD, where is your driver CD, where is your Win95 CD..." routine).
possible-devices: /dev/hdc /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sde
Program scans each of them looking for what it needs, gets it, then tells
you what it doesn't have yet. Of course, if you have other methods tried
before this asks you, but hey.
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