> As It now seems I will be using boot-floppies for > a while on, I'm curious to know a bit more of other > peoples earlier concerns with this installation > method.
>From a user's perspective boot-floppies offers a lot of options, this is good and bad. People with obscure hardware are pleased that they can preload modules from a floppy to access their hard drive, but 99% of users won't ever use that option, for example. We do have a verbose and a non-verbose mode that helps with some of this, though we err on the side of caution (that is, asking questions if we can't be completely sure we can guess the correct answer). It has been said that a chicken can install boot-floppies if you put a piece of corn on the return key. This is mostly true. boot-floppies asks a lot of questions but the default answer is for the most part what users should choose. >From a developer's point of view boot-floppies is large and has a fair number of ugly files (choose_medium.c is perhaps the best example, IMO). The build system is complicated and uses a lot of different languages, though nothing obscure. The build takes a long time to complete (20 minutes or so on a 2-year old i386, many hours on m68k). > > Is there some gathered collection of intallaton > difficulties or design complaints over the years ? > Where? You can take a look at http://bugs.debian.org/boot-floppies especally in the wishlist section. > > I would also like to see if there is any possibility > of me doing some smaller hacking into the old boot > floppies package to do some smaller workaround fixes. sure. No big changes or new features will likely be accepted into cvs but bug fixes are encouraged. If you have new features that are obviously correct, tested and won't break anything they might be accepted as well. If you need to make bigger changes you can fork development and keep your own tree. > What language was woodys debootstrap developed in? debootstrap is a shell script, it is used by both debian-installer and boot-floppies to install the base system once a harddrive is partitioned. dbootstrap is the boot-floppies install program. It is in C. > > Are the debian bootfloppies still maintained ? maintained but not with vigor. The installer in Debian has typically been a stumbling block, not gotten perhaps as much attention as it deserves. We're hoping that debian-installer will be more fun to work on. With limited resources we'd like most people to concentrate on debian-installer. > by whome ? The people on this list for the most part. -David -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
