Re: Recent ITPs...
On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 04:01:55PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 08:20:06AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> > I forgot to CC this list on two recent ITPs I've made, both of which are
> > now in incoming:
> >
> > 1. Cash, the Caml Shell system.
> >
> > 2. dfdsbuild, an OCaml app that builds Debian From Scratch ISO images.
> >
> > All code of any significant size in this app is written in OCaml, and
> > I have a statically-linked ocamlopt-generated binary for /bin/init
> > on the initrd that is generated for the system.
>
> John, could you comment more on the functionality of this second package ?
>
> Is it a debian installer like thing, or some process for generating
> 'Debian from scratch' iso images ? Depending from where you group the
> words, there could be more than one interpretation about it.
dfsbuild is a package that generates the Debian From Scratch ISO images.
The resulting images, if the default configuration is used, contain a
very complete live rescue filesystem as well as enough to use
cdebootstrap to install the base system of all three current i386 trees
and amd64 sid.
dfsbuild itself is highly configurable, letting the user control what is
put on the CD, what mirrors are used to obtain packages, what kernel
images are used, etc.
Two programs that go on the CD are also written in OCaml. The first,
/sbin/init on the initrd (initial ramdisk) is responsible for
discovering which CD-ROM drive holds the DFS CD and mounting it. The
second, startup, takes control immediately after the DFS CD is mounted
and root is pivoted. It prepares /etc/fstab and the runtime ramdisk,
then finally passes control to the real /sbin/init to bring up the
system. Both of these two are statically-linked ocamlopt-generated
binaries. They are statically-linked because we don't know at compile
time what version of libc the user is going to have installed on the CD
(you can pick which Debian dist you want on there; if dfsbuild was
compiled on unstable but the user is building a testing CD, then the
resulting binary may not work.)
-- John
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