On Fri, Mar 01, 2002 at 01:25:10PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > > This is pretty much how the NFS live filesystem support works in PGI, as > > well. > > Aha. Pity. This might be something to see about changing in udebs & > PGI post woody, then. We had some back-and-forth within Progeny as to whether the live filesystem should look like a real Debian system or not. At present, the live filesystem doesn't even pretend to be FHS-compliant. > > > I'm just not seeing what's different about PGI's approach here that means > > > you're not limited to the feature set that PGI supports, I guess. > > If the concept behind PGI bores you to tears, > > Hardly. Bdale was quite enthusiastic about it at linux.conf.au, and your > feature list certainly backs that up. Sorry for my intemperate response. In re-reading your mail I found it wasn't as hostile as I was perceiving it to be. I guess when the anaesthesiologist told me yesterday not to sign any legal documents for 24 hours, I should have interpreted that to include GPG-signed messages on Debian mailing lists. :) > > PGI is presented as an alternative Debian installation system, not as a > > boot-floppies killer. > > boot-floppies is already on its death bed. It needs an heir, not someone > to twist the knife. I'm very interested in seeing if PGI can be made into what the debian-installer project needs. > Well, at any rate, that's what I'm interested in. Using it as an > alternative woody installer is interesting to some people, obviously. The motivation behind PGI is to increase Debian's popularity by making the installation process more friendly for users, and easier to deploy for administrators. (However, past a certain point, the latter group should be using an auto-installer instead.) > > You run pgi-build --no-post-clean, put misc/live at the NFS export > > location, and tell your users to use it. > > E.g., at the syslinux prompt: > > install nfs=my.nifty.host:/export/live > > It's not really reasonable for Debian to do this over the Internet, > though, is it? (scalability issues with too many people doing it and few > mirrors, and security issues where it's hard to validate an NFS site is > what you expect in advance and "easy" to hijack them once they exist) No. It wasn't my intention to imply that Debian should be doing this at full scale. > So this feature is basically targeted at media-less installs at a > particular site, right? Load up a server, turn on all the machines, and > have them all just automatically install without having to do anything, > more or less. Not exactly. What you're talking about is "autoinstall": Description: Progeny Debian auto-installation system This package contains the Progeny Debian auto-installation system. This system makes it possible to install a complete Debian system with no user interaction from a set of configuration files. . The basic model is that of cloning an existing system; after installing and configuring a Debian system to taste, the configuration is "dumped" to the configuration files, along with some extra information. . It currently supports flexible constraints for partitioning differently-sized disks in a logical fashion, hardware auto-configuration with discover (including configuration of X, if appropriate), network configuration via DHCP or a database based on MAC addresses, and a cross-platform design making it possible for install media for any platform to be created on any other platform. . Platform-specific files are not included in this package; install the "autoinstall-<arch>" packages to install support for <arch>. autoinstall is already in unstable. The raison d'être behind the NFS-mounted live filesystem feature in PGI is that it allows sites to revise practically all parts of their PGI-based installer without having to burn and deploy a new set of CD's. > > > It doesn't much matter if PGI doesn't already do this; there's no real > > > reason why it couldn't be udeb'ed, but some of the things you've said > > > seem to indicate that it might already manage this, or something like it. > > Well, not everything you might need to have on the live filesystem > > (e.g., XFree86, GTK+, Glade) may be udeb'ed. > > Well, debootstrap still isn't udeb'ed atm, so that goes without saying, > for now. > > How're you choosing what bits of XFree86/GTK+/Glade get put on the > installation media? Are you just going with "everything in the .deb", > or do you have special exclusion lists or something? This is managed by simple lists of files that are needed. See, for example, /usr/share/pgi/stage1/internal.files.list. -- G. Branden Robinson | There's nothing an agnostic can't Debian GNU/Linux | do if he doesn't know whether he branden@debian.org | believes in it or not. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Graham Chapman
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