On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 11:51:54AM +0000, David Given wrote: > No Spam wrote: > [...] > >>I'm not sure that that's what's happening, but it makes sense. You > >>can easily install a filesystem with "debootstrap - Bootstrap a basic > >>Debian system". > > > >That seems like such overkill. > > I'm trying to do something similar; I'm putting together an embedded > system, and want to populate it from Debian packages. I need to create a > minimal chrooted Debian system in a subdirectory and then copy it to my > target. > > debootstrap is, indeed, overkill. It insists on not only creating a local > admin database but also on downloading all the packages it needs *into* > that admin database, which takes forever. It also insists on installing all > sorts of stuff that I'm never going to want to use --- my embedded system > doesn't *need* exim, for example. Investigate the --exclude option for debootstrap. Though it looks like what you actually want isn't a Debian system at all, but simply a bunch of binaries which happen to have been built by Debian. In that case, your simplistic extractor shell script is probably pretty much what you want -- as long as you realise the complete non-upgradability and non-maintainability (in the usual system administrative sense) of your chroot, it seems like the sensible option. Be careful, though, of random destruction of /usr/share/doc -- I've come across some licences which require certain statements to be preserved alongside the software they apply to, and the licence (as stored in /usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright) is the only location of said statements in the Debian binary package. - Matt
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature