Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?
On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 04:26:16PM -0700, Joel Baker wrote:
I must admit to some confusion, here. Should I take this as implying that
there is no particular intent to try to make Debian-Installer play nicely
on anything but Linux kernels?
I'm saying that some things that an installer does are by their nature
specific to a kernel. Others are not. If the people writing the software
decide that a particular piece is better written to use /proc or /devfs,
then they should use /proc or /devfs without losing a lot of sleep over
it. (I can think of one trivial example--devfs makes it really easy to
tell which disks are available to the partitioning program. Can you
describe a simple method to do that, which is guaranteed to work on any
kernel? Likewise, can you describe a kernel-independent way of parsing
the pci device table and loading relevant drivers?) If you want to
support the same functionality on whatever other kernel you want to
use, you'll have to write some (kernel-specific) code to do so. Does
that mean you can't leverage the partitioning tool once a device is
given? Or that you can't use the network config tool once the network
drivers have been loaded? Of course not--so why are you trying to start
some sort of kernel jihad?
Mike Stone
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