[erbenson@alaska.net: Re: Still no base tarball]
Hi,
this is relevant for everyone concerned about development of installers for
Debian Hurd systems.
It indicates that something akin cross-install will become the default,
rather than the tar file method.
I think the next thing I'll do in this area is to "port" debootstrap
to the Hurd. It's not really cross, as it uses the dpkg --unpack feature,
but as I want to have native Hurd installs, and it is trivial to replace
dpkg with dpkg-hurd, this is of secondary importance (and maybe, someday dpkg
will get the --do-not-run-any-packages-scripts option which lack of makes
dpkg-hurd necessary).
----- Forwarded message from Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net> -----
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On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 10:53:54AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
>
> "Just the fax mam."
>
> I have been trying to gain the information you just provided from our very
> first interaction. You have objected to doing technical support for the
> inatllation item many of our new installs will need. When I continued
> having problems obtaining necessary information, it seemed reasonable to
> ask a wider audience.
fine since aj won't explain it i will.
base tarballs are obsolete and deprecated, period.
the ONLY time a base tarball should be used to install the base system
is for hard disk based installs. it should never be used for CD
installs, or network installs, ever.
for CD installs and network installs debootstrap simply uses the
normal debian archive, that is the .debs found in the pool and the apt
Packages/Release files in dists/woody/binary-* for CDs all necessary
packages will be on CD1, for the network everything is there
obviously.
so the basedebs.tgz file should NOT be present on offcial Debian CDs,
nor should it be used for CD based installs. dbootstrap or
debootstrap will never download the basedebs.tgz file from the
network, if you have network connectivity the real debian archive will
be used, NOT a base tarball.
that leaves hard disk installs (installing from files on a FAT or HFS
partition) generally its unlikly that the user will have a debian
mirror on their harddisk, since its basically impossible given the
crippled nature of those filesystems. in those cases they will
download a basedebs.tgz (from where has yet to be determined),
drivers.tgz and other b-f files manually with whatever downloading
software comes with the proprietary OS in use. when they select a
hard disk based install method dbootstrap will first see there is no
debian mirror, then it will check for a basedebs.tgz in whatever
directory the user specified (that is if they specify /debian,
dbootstrap will check for /debian/basedebs.tgz).
reasons a hard disk install might be desired are:
* lack of CDs
* lack of CDROM
* lack of decent network connection (read the connection requires junk
like ppp or pppoe)
futhermore basedebs.tgz does not contain a root filesystem, all it
contains is /var/cache/apt/archives (with all the .debs that make up
the base system) and /var/lib/apt/lists (with the Packages files).
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
----- End forwarded message -----
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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