Re: Release Time
On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, Philip Hands wrote:
> Would including the directories, and Packages files on all CD's do the trick ?
>
> So the contrib directory and Packages file would be on the binary-<arch> CD,
> but none of the packages files would --- would the fact that the packages are
> missing break things, or would you get to swap CD's around and have it just
> pick up whatever was available ?
That sounds like a good idea. It was also suggested by Kevin Traas:
On Thu, 16 Jul 1998, Kevin Traas wrote:
> When creating my own D2 CD's, I placed the contrib (and non-free and
> non-US) Package.gz files on the main CD. Into the proper directory
> structure as well, of course. I found I *also* had to put one of the
> .deb files from each section into the corresponding directory alongside
> the Packages.gz file.
>
> Once I'd done this, I'd satisfied dselect completely and everything
> worked well... sort of.
Apparently, you need to have a .deb in the tree as well to satisfy the
check_binary () function in /usr/lib/dpkg/methods/disk/setup. The .deb
can be an empty file.
> With this method, I was hoping that dselect would allow me to select all
> the packages I wanted (even though they didn't actually exist on the
> CD) and then let me install by going through and doing all the main
> stuff and just skipping all the missing contrib and non-free packages.
> But, it didn't quite work out as planned.
I'd like to hear from Kevin what went wrong. Did it effectively not work
or was there just some amount of annoyance in working around broken
defaults?
When patching the disk methods, maybe it would be a good idea to implement
a mechanism whereby dselect tries to read text files from the cd and
parses or displays the text. I was thinking of the following:
- a file in the cd root, mentioning the debian version, which disc it is,
what parts of the distribution are on it and where the packages trees
are. The latter information is useful for the user, but could also be
parsed by dselect to provide good defaults.
- a file in each tree, to be displayed at cdrom method setup time with a
descriptive text of the tree and optionally an explanation why that part
of the tree isn't on any cd.
- a file in each tree, to be displayed right before dselect actually runs
"dpkg -iGROEB" and telling the user which cd should be in the drive. If
the file is nonexistant, dselect skkips it and does not pause before
running dpkg.
The latter two files could be merged if some kind of header is
implemented.
Any comments? If there are no major objections to this, I'll try to
implement it this weekend, barring the outcome of another issue:
It has been discussed before that dselect's cdrom method might have
problems with multi-cd's and then it was noted that dpkg-mountable should
handle these situations more gracefully and that we should make the
mountable method the default. What is the status on this discussion? Has
anybody tested the mountable method with multi-cd's lately? Are we still
planning to make that method the default?
Cheers,
Joost
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