Re: woody Debian Installer plans
Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 06:18:02PM +1100, Glenn McGrath wrote:
> > The debian installer team is currently planning how the next installer
> > will work, documents describing these plans are at
> > http://cvs.debian.org/debian-installer/doc/
>
> [...]
>
> > If anyone has has strong opinions on the installer i would encourage
> > them to checkout the documents and recent threads on debian-boot mailing
> > list and discuss there thoughts on the debian-boot mailing list.
>
> Well, the documents are short on details and full of linuxisms, but this was
> probably to be expected.
>
> It seems that a lot of those "modules" would need to be rewritten for the
> Hurd ("mounting" for example works different on the Hurd than under linux).
> It would be nice if you can keep this in mind.
>
> Also, it always talks about lilo/silo. It would be nice if we could enter
> the 21. century and use GRUB. This also helps the Hurd of course, because it
> is the only boot loader we can use. (GRUB is under active development, and
> it is a great bootloader, with menus, file system support etc etc).
>
> Because everything is supposed to be modular, I expect to be able to disable
> all those nifty linux-only modules when starting to work on Hurd boot disks,
> so I don't have to say much about those.
>
> Thanks,
> Marcus
>
The way the new installer will work is that the boot kernel is not the
kernel that will be used once install finishes.
So if installing either linux, hurd, (or maybe even one of BSD's one
day) to i386 you can still use the linux i386 installer, the linux
installer can detect your hardware, prepare your target media, and find
the archive. Then just extract a different set of packages dependign on
the kernel to be used.
After a reboot you will be in your native environent, i guess a postinst
or something will have to be run in the native environment to do some
fine tuning.
As far as bootloaders goes, i dont think it will be a problem using
different bootloaders, every different architecture has a different one
for initial booting anyway. But i realise grub will have to be installed
for the hurd, i remember talk some time ago about using it for linux,
cant remember what happened about it.
I am very new to the Hurd, i just installed it last night (it was simple
just extracting a tarball), so i cant say im speaking from experience,
do you see any problems with the above?
I dont think there is anyone on the boot-floppies team that is really
representing the hurd (i could be wrong), so feel free to join in the
discussions on debian-boot mail list.
Its important we make the right decisions from all viewpoints at this
early stage.
Glenn
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