On 2018-01-09 at 22:54, John Hosack wrote: > Hello, > > This is a bug report. I tried to use the reporting system, but it did not > seem to be appropriate. So, I will give a narrative: Bug reports need to be filed in the Debian bug tracker, on bugs.debian.org, not mailed to debian-user. You can do that either by E-mailing submit@bugs.debian.org with an appropriately-formatted E-mail, or with the 'reportbug' program (which in fact generates and attempts to send such an E-mail). In the case of bugs in the installer, the correct (pseudo-)package to file the bug against is probably 'installation-report'. > This is what happened. > I decided to install Debian on my small machine (Asus eeePC 900A, 1GB > ram, 4GB storage). So I selected debian-9.3.0-i386-xfce-CD-1.iso and > put it onto a flash memory stick. Installation went ok, but > later on when I did "apt install gcc", the installation program > requested the insertion of the installation disk in the drive > /media/cdrom. Why? > > Examination. > The /etc/apt/sources.list file had "deb: cdrom:[<installation>..." as > the first entry, and was not commented out. My installation medium > was wrong! > > Solution. > Comment out "deb: cdrom:[<installation>..." in sources.list. > > Discussion. > There are 2 problems: > (1) Installation should not put the installation medium in the > sources.list, at least not without asking the user, > since the medium may be reused. The installation medium has to be present in sources.list during the install process, in order for apt to be able to find the repository contained on that medium. In some cases, the user may decide after the initial OS install to install additional packages which were available on the install medium. To facilitate doing that (rather than downloading the packages over the network, which may be expensive or impossible in some cases), the sources.list entry is retained post-install, but commented out. If the entry was not changed to be commented out during the conclusion of the initial OS install procedure, that sounds like an issue indeed, although a relatively minor one. But the inclusion of the entry in sources.list is not an error, and ceasing to include such entries there at all would be problematic. > (2) Installation should keep track of the installation medium; > if necessary by asking the user. How? What information should it record, and how would this information be useful? > (2) reflects a wider problem: Debian has a legacy of > assuming CD or DVD installation. But much is now done by > flash memory sticks. Debian should change to reflect this. > For example, the iso file names might be "large" (or "full") > or "small" (or "base"), not "DVD" or "CD". References > to "CD" or "DVD" should be replaced by reference to the > "installation medium", unless "CD" is actually necessary. Etc. If I understand matters correctly, there is a not-purely-historical reason for these names: the sizes of the images, particularly in the case of multi-image sets, are determined based on what is expected to be able to fit on a DVD or a CD. Which is not to say that it would necessarily not be worth attempting to modernize things here, as such optical media become more and more a historical irrelevancy - just that it's not as trivial as you may think. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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