d-i

Response from my d-i help wanted posting has been better than expected, especially after it was in DWN and now LWN. Notably, there have been quite a few contributed splash screens, or reports of people working on them. And Bastian Kleineidam added udeb support to linda. There is also clearly a lot of interest in d-i for the sparc, so I hope that that team pulls it off in time. (And I'm sorry that I forgot y'all were working on it!) There has even been some S/390 activity. And some, but not enough, work on categorising installation reports. We still need to get more Debian developers involved in d-i.

It seems that d-i's problems with the default distribution to install are sorted out, after a long night of coding. Today I wrapped that up, uploaded a lot of other pending d-i stuff, including the scary new version of base-config, and worked with waldi on getting base-installer and apt-install to call apt in a safe way. That was an annoying problem, we have /cdrom mounted outside the chroot, but apt wants to use it inside the chroot. The old method was a grody hack that exposed libc mismatches between d-i and the installed system; the new approach uses a bind mount, which will cause trouble for 2.2. I doubt there is a really good fix. Hmm, maybe a small web server written in shell ... nah.

I battered my head against the d-i's main-menu/anna/retreivers wall a bit more today as well. I put in a fairly decent workaround to the overall problem in cdrom-detect, so SCSI cdroms should be usable again w/ a driver floppy, but the root floppy still has this annoying situation if you want to use it to load d-i from a cdrom -- after every step, it goes back to network setup, even if you have no network. Aside from splitting it into two floppies, I still don't know what to do about that. Perhaps this problem will solve itself that way; the current root floppy is nearly full.