Re: non-main non-firmware software and Debian installation

[Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org>]

Hi,

On 9/10/22 11:37, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

> Multiplying installers might be a complexity too far at this or any other
> stage.

We already multiply installers along several axes. Most of these work by 
simply selecting different file sets and detecting at runtime whether a 
specific file is present or has to be retrieved, this would likely work 
here as well except for "very early" firmware.

For those, we need a mechanism to decide what is "very early" anyway, 
because it needs to go into the initramfs in order to be available 
before the installer has found itself, and we need to be selective about 
that because initramfs size is a huge issue already.

For all the normal firmware packages, we also need to have a 
netinst/regular split anyway, regardless of whether we want separate 
installers, and we need a mechanism to extract only what is necessary 
into the initramfs, or we increase the installer memory requirements yet 
again.

So having additional installers is the smallest technical challenge here.

   Simon