On Sat, Jun 16, 2001 at 04:19:51PM -0400, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
>
> Honestly, the best approach here is to hack debootstrap, say, with a
> special arg, so that instead of building base, it constructs enough of
> a local mirror so that you could install base. Of course, the
> packages in base are going to vary from arch to arch, and most of the
> packages are arch-dependant....
this is my thought, have debootstrap download all the packages it
needs into a flat directory, then you just tar up that directory. put
it on a hard disk and unpack it in /target/var/cache/apt/archives.
telling debootstrap there that it should skip the download part and
just start installing as if it had just finished the download.
> Anyhow, assuming you had a subset of a debian archive, enough to get
> base, and you can get that via http, nfs, or ftp, if you had that, why
> is that less convenient to install from the actual packages rather
> than from a big fat tarball?
because you can get the tarball to the machine via a hard disk rather
easily, and if the only filesystem the target machine has at the
moment is a crippled one tarball is the only way.
we are getting a mail or two on debian-powerpc from people who
configure a dual boot system, but have dsl with that horrible pppoe
garbage. since the boot-floppies don't support that they can't
install base. under potato they would download the base.tgz ahead of
time and keep it on CrippledFileSystem.
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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