Let's just ignore the several elements of Ingo's mail that seem to invite a flamewar, including the multiple ad-homimem attacks. Hmm, let's ignore the crying over spilled milk bits too. I'm left with this: Ingo Juergensmann wrote: > Of course, when you do such things as a new installer, you have additional > work in porting it. Actually Dirk was referring to something I'm doing that was never even attempted with the boot floppies, namely automatically installing Debian in many different ways every day. I currently run 50 automated installs a day spanning 5 arches (i386 ia64 hppa s390[1] sparc) and am adding a 6th (alpha), and proably soon a 7th (powerpc) and maybe even an 8th (mips). There's some sysadmin load involved in even keeping all these machines on a usable network and reasonale operating environment. Of course this would not have been very doable with the boot-floppies installer, since it lacked both preseeding for fully automated installs, as well as pluggable debconf frontends for non-automated but easily expect driven installs. Why do we need to do this? Well, there are many changes in debian that can break the installer, and until I added a s390[1] to my test farm, we got maybe one s390 install a quarter. Until I added a hppa we got maybe 2 hppa install reports a month. When all the other low-usage architectures are factored in, it becomes very hard to keep the installer even basically working on all the architectures, because it can take months to get a set of installation reports for a given d-i version accross all archirtectures. Which is a very real example of how needing to support additional architectures can slow things down tremendously. For a few more examples, see my comments on this wiki page: http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?TooManyArchitectures -- see shy jo [1] emulated but still a PITA to keep running
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