Re: UBIFS support to Debian Installer?

[Per Andersson <avtobiff@gmail.com>]

Hi!

Sorry for my late reply, I have been busy with since I returned from DebConf10.


On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> wrote:
> +++ Bill Gatliff [2010-09-03 11:18 -0500]:
>> Guys:
>>
>>
>> I'm considering putting forth an effort to add UBIFS support to the
>> Debian Installer.  Initially, all I want is a pre-specified partition
>> layout that gets applied automatically during the installation
>> process; later on, maybe some user input would be nice.

Yay! \o/


>> The guys on #debian-boot haven't been real responsive to my questions.
>>  Does anyone here know anything about how to accomplish the above?  It
>> looks like I would just dump some scripts and stuff into the partman
>> tree, but the details are completely beyond my grasp at this point.
>> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Most of the work has been done, by Per Andersson as a GSoC project in
> 2009. The tricky bit is getting parted to do something with
> not-real-disks. The patch for that was sent but never got merged
> upstream( I discovered last week, so we proabbly missed squeeze). It
> needs a bit of chivvying, and I'd love to see it finished.
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-arm@lists.debian.org/msg09935.html
> http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/MTD
>
> I think you'll find that what you want pretty-much works already. It
> might need a bit of updating as a year has passed.

No one was really responsive anywhere, not parted upstream either. And I did not
push for changes.

Basically, the story goes like this.

Originally Wookey and I thought we could do everything from shell
script with existing UBI
tools. This was not possible, parted needs to be able to understand
MTD (and maybe UBI).

At DebConf10 Colin Watson told me that he had a quick look at the
changes I made to parted
and that I should try pushing them upstream again, since no one looked
at them last time.

I really want to work on this, and will soon have more time to do it.
Let's keep in touch!


Best,
Per