Re: tar file, boot floppies
I suppose that I should make a small report.
My objective was to get a functioning HURD installation CD(s) out the door
and available as quickly as possible.
I am quite happy to continue with this, but there are dangers if I am
allowed to continue by myself, what happens if I am hit by a bus? Forking
being another. From a personal point of view, I can hardly follow my own
butchering as I have minimal programming skills. In short, a team is
necessary.
Boot Floppies. (I am talking about the Debian package)
Creating base*.tgz (the tarball) is easily separated out from boot
floppies and I am treating this separately. At the moment I am doing some
work on this part, and at this stage it seems that it needs to be created
on a HURD system. I now have a HURD partition on my main machine and hope
to do something about it over the next few weeks. I hope to automate the
process. It is a challenge, but I would not be hurt if Marcus or someone
else did it.
Boot/root disks are easy to create for HURD. They use Linux at the moment
and I see no real reason to change to using the HURD. They work well,
there are well tested partitioning utilities available and the fork
between my HURD floppies creation scripts would be easy to close. The
Linux boot-floppies require a number of sophisticated packages, some of
which I suspect are not available with the HURD at present, but I have not
checked. There is a "purity" issue of wanting to install HURD with HURD,
but I can see no reason, sometime in the future, for stopping a decision
being made to install Linux with HURD. To me, what works best should be
used. I would welcome the closing of the fork. Roll on becoming a Debian
developer!
debian-cd (Again I am talking about the Debian package)
The butchered scripts are messy at the moment, and will continue to be so
for some time I suspect. The HURD is very much under development and so
the scripts are full of work-a-rounds and these change every few weeks.
For example, two completely different packages are used to create CD1 and
CD2, these could be combined, but they would have to be modified for the F
series so it easier to keep them separate at the moment. There are vital
tools that are missing from the HURD, eg mkisofs, which prevent debian-cd
being ported.
I have made earlier versions of my butchered scripts for debian-cd and
boot-floppies available on the index page of my site, an older version of
boot-floppies is still there. I can either put the current ones up there
again or upload them somewhere. This could be a useful starting point
as people could then decide what to do without any hidden agenda of
mine. What would people like me to do? Would people like me to continue
to look at the tarball and do the same there?
Yes, we do need a team and I would be happy to be part of it. That
is the best way of going about the development of the HURD CDs. Maybe the
skills of a Linux CD vendor were needed at this initial stage.
Phil.
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Philip Charles; 39a Paterson St., Dunedin, New Zealand; +64 3 4882818
Mobile 025 267 9420. I sell GNU/Linux CDs. See http://www.copyleft.co.nz
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