Re: Installing debian from floppies.

[Steve Preston <steve%eowyn@gte.com>]

Thanks for the response, Ian.

>>>>> Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> Steve Preston writes [reordered]:

>> 2a) How hard would it be to make dpkg work with packages that have
>> been split across multiple diskettes?

> Not at all.  There is already a tool for splitting packages in a
> special way that makes them easy for dpkg to process.  You can just
> feed the parts to dpkg separately and it will put them together
> behind the scenes when it has all the parts of a particular package.

> The tool is called `dpkg-split'.  It should compile on most Unix
> systems - it's part of the dpkg suite.

Ok, great.  I got dpkg-1.0.5.tar.gz and built dpkg-split on my HP-UX
machine.  

{ASIDE: 

     BTW, is there a bug mailing list?  I don't know how much it
     matters, but these were the problems I had building dpkg-split,
     which required dpkg-deb and md5sum:

     (1) 'configure' initially guessed wrong about a lot of things,
	 until I removed config.cache.

     (2) (lib/lock.c) flock() is a BSD function; not POSIX.  If you
	 want to be POSIX, you should use fcntl().

     (3) (lib/compat.c) In the function strsignal(), not all libc's
	 have a sys_siglist[] array.

END-ASIDE}

So anyway, I've been able to split .deb files.

> If you make a pile of floppies that have the .deb files (split where
> appropriate using dpkg-split) on msdos filesystems you should be able
> to use dselect's `floppy disk' installation method.

Question: I presume dpkg will tell the user to switch floppies if it
cannot find the appropriate .deb file on the current one.  Does this
work with whole as well as split .deb files?  In other words, can I
use dselect to select a bunch of packages, spread (and possibly split)
across several floppies?

Question: Is there some way to tell dpkg which floppies have which
.deb files?  I am thinking that, when I am writing the dos files, I
could also create a map file that says, for example, that the gdb
package is on the 'devel3' floppy, etc.  Then, I copy this map file to
my linux hard disk, and dpkg uses it to tell me which floppy to insert
next.

-- 
Steve Preston (spreston@gte.com)