On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 05:34:50PM -0500, Michael Stone wrote: > On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 11:09:32AM -0700, Matt Porter wrote: > > On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 06:31:19AM -0500, Michael Stone wrote: > > > Alternatively, if the boot disks really inspire such apathy from > > > developers, maybe we need to kill them and just steal redhat's. > > > > I'm an active boot developer and want to point out that using redhat's or > > anybody else's boot scheme is not so simple. You need to add support for > > other archs like Debian has > > Doesn't redhat come on more than one arch? Sort of. Generally only x86 is updated at the fast pace with the other poorly selling architectures lagging far behind. > > plus all the Deb-specific features we have in boot-floppies. > > What features? Features is a bad term...we'll have to identify every place that dbootstrap tweaks some file specific to our filesystem layout and port it to the redhat installer. If you can do that overnight, get it checked into CVS as the new Debian potato installer. Does redhat's installer install from all the different media types that Debian's does? > On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 11:15:45AM -0700, Matt Porter wrote: > > On Sun, Nov 07, 1999 at 07:58:48AM -0500, Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote: > > > Question: Is there any reason why we can't take the current boot disks > > > and stick a new kernel, libc etc. on them. They won't be as good as the > > > new ones I'm sure but they're quite serviceable IMO. > > > > Sure there is, they don't properly support the non-x86 architectures. I'm > > specifically concerned about powerpc. If you released potato without the > > new boot-floppies that I've been working on full-time for my company then > > you would lose a full-time developer. I'm sure other powerpc/m68k etc. > > developers would feel quite alienated as well. > > When I asked about freezing three months ago, the main criticism was that we > didn't have working boot floppies. Now you're saying that the reason we > can't use the old boot floppies is that they don't support powerpc? If > that's the only hold up, we could have released potato already and > frozen *woody* in 2000. (IOW, if a new arch isn't 100% ready it seems a > whole lot more reasonable to not put it in until it's done, rather than > holding up n other archs.) When I started working on boot-floppies, I worked on it for at least 3-4 months doing powerpc porting work before I ever once saw an x86-based developer show up (excluding Adam who was doing plenty of documentation). I've fixed a ton of problems generically across the various archs as well as doing a bunch of powerpc specific fixes. What I'm telling you is that potato is supposed to have the powerpc arch as well as some value add in the boot-floppies that include dhcp support and ftp/http installation. The x86 boot-floppies do not work either in the current CVS, and so this delay is the fault of lack of developers for x86 boot-floppies. Had we decided to not allow in an updated busybox plus the new installation features, we would be ready for the freeze. powerpc has right on top of the game the whole time whereas x86 has been the problem architecture...who would have thought? I hate to start an arch-war but trying to point fingers at a non-x86 arch as holding things up is about as far from the truth as you can get. If you want an update that is x86 only then do an official 2.1 update with Joey's 2.2.12 boot-floppies. -- Matt Porter mmporter@home.com This is Linux Country. On a quiet night, you can hear Windows reboot.
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