Re: vancouver revisited
Hi,
> > How do you boot to a system to run debian-installer when there is no
> > bios or bootloader on the system yet?
> Just take a look at the existing Debian ports, and you see that it's ok
> to use a bios that's part of the hardware.
Eh, that was not what I asked. My point was, that there is no bios..
only empty flash. When you power it up, it will never ask for any
kind of installation media.
> > jffs2 image, which is then flashed to a pile of devices. Walking
> > through d-i every time would be very clumsy, so there is no use
> > for a working installer for those systems.
> Do we speak about ports to architectures or machines?
Machines and archs. On mips/mipsel/arm we have the situation that we
support d-i on some legacy dead-end systems, while there is a pile new
embedded systems on same arch. If you are working on the embedded side,
it feels silly to maintain installer for machines you are not using,
just for the sake of keeping the port in debian.
On the worse side, there is archs like Axis cris/ SuperH,
where pc-style machines have not really existed, an installer designed
for installing desktops/servers does not make much sense.
> If the sole
> purpose is to be able to flash some embedded device, frankly speaking I
> doubt that we need to host any *.deb-files on the ftp mirror network.
Incidentally the awesome amount of precompiled binaries packages for
esoteric archs Debian has, is the biggest (only?) advantage we have over
other distributions in embedded space. Mirror space is irrelevant,
having them available from a few mirrors would be just as good as
propagating to all mirrors.
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