Re: slink is gone, goals for potato?

[Bruce Sass <bsass@bms.freenet.edmonton.ab.ca>]

On 3 Mar 1999, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> Bruce Sass <bsass@bms.freenet.edmonton.ab.ca> writes:
re:  boot-floppies
>    the `stuff' discussed in -admintool is integrated into them,
>    so that it is easy to do `perl/perl-base' with any package;
> 
> Could you summarize to this list?  I don't follow -admintool.

:) pretty tough to do, in the short time I have been following it the
discussion has been all over the place.  Wichert has some stuff that
gets you the gist of it, but it is too early (maybe way too early) to
have any hard rules to follow.  Essentially, a hands-off configuration
is one of the goals, which implies a DB and some way of deferring 
decisions.

Installation is really just a special case of configuration management.

>    "scalable" and "modular" are prominent features,
>    so the set can fit onto two or three floppies and be fleshed out fully
>    from a separate package after the basic installation is complete.
> 
> Do you mean the base system or the install floppies?  I'm not planning
> to change the base system, but there will only be one or at most two
> install floppies plus a drivers floppy.

Both.  Like it or not, "base" is part of the installation; if you don't
touch base then the installation is still 8 or 9 disks.  On one hand you
have people wanting more in base, on the other people complain that
there is too much... the only way I can see to please everybody is to
have a scalable basic installation, install portions of "base" (as
defined by what is under .../base/ in the package tree) instead of
everything at one time.

Base part 1 should only contain the _bare_necessities_ required 
for the system to configure and upgrade itself; it, along with drivers, 
rescue floppy and lowmem disk with a minimal kernel should be all
that is required to do an installation.  The rest of base (timezones,
info files, manpages, etc.) could be packaged up in a variety of ways,
whatever is best for the media being used and the functionality
required and desired.

The current installation procedure can almost do this, 
<wink> all </wink> that is needed is to change the behaviour 
from
	...
	load-base
	configure-base
	...
	install (users-stuff)
	...

to
	...
	load (base-part-1)
	? configure
	loop "load up more of base?"
		y) load (base-part-x)
		   ? configure
		   continue
		n) ? configure
		   break
	...
	install (the-rest-of-base, users-stuff)
	...


Does that help.


- Bruce