loggy days

I've not been concentrating well or doing much the last couple of days. Yesterday I was outright lethargic and did nothing all day but catch up on 1.5 years of Pratchett books. Today I was at least able to stomach using the computer, and did a few things, like putting a provisional syslinux boot logo in d-i, and setting up some d-i backup stuff, and talking some build system changes over with ths. A nice long walk helped bring up my energy some, but I've still not managed to focus down and get to coding today.

I have started grappling again with an annoying d-i issue though. It's the problem of what distrubtion d-i should default to installing. Currently, d-i uses suites, not codenames, and will install testing by default. We need to use suites (testing, unstable) in the UI for several good reasons, but this does present a problem, since eventually we want d-i to install stable. The trick is how to do this without having a flag day when we rebuild all the images to default to using stable. One way to do it is to make the images default to using stable already, and require testers choose testing (possibly via a boot flag).

Another approach, and the one I am currently leaning toward, is to make d-i know the codename of Debian it prefers to install, and check the mirror to see if that version is available. If so, make the suite it corresponds to the default in the question. So d-i would know that it is currently targeted at installing sarge, and would look at sarge's Release file, find that sarge is testing (or, eventually, stable), and make that suite the default.