[pkg-fso-maint] Downloadable result of install.sh?

[Steffen Moeller]

Hi Nikita,

Nikita V. Youshchenko wrote:
>> "Nikita V. Youshchenko" <yoush at debian.org> writes:

>>> Looking at recent discussions in several lists, quite a people are
>>> unable to complete debian-on-freerunner installation with install.sh
>>> because of dependency issues.
>>>
>>> Given nature of debian unstable, such situations will happen in future
>>> as well. This looks like contant source of frustration to all those
>>> new users who want to try debian.
>>>
>>> Because of that, it could be a good idea to keep a tarball of
>>> successfully completed install.sh somewhere, and let people download
>>> and unpack that (either as a backup option, or even as a recommended
>>> way).
>>>
>>> What do you think?
>> What do you mean... the whole result of the Debian system ?
> 
> Problem is that running cdebootstrap of debian unstable will be broken 
> sometimes similary to how it is broken now. We just can't do anything with 
> it, that is how unstable works.

Thank you for this de-emotionalising comment. It helps. I have added an
option "--bootstrapper" to install.sh which allows to fall back to debootstrap,
actually, it is the default for the very moment.

> Because of that, there install.sh should have an option (and I vote that to 
> be default) not to cdebootstrap new installation, but download and unpack 
> filesystem tarball instead. This also has an advantage of being much 
> faster.
> 
> Such a tarball could be created and updated (e.g. daily) using 
> (c)debootstrap and pkg-fso's server side. This will keep it up-to-date, 
> but if/when it does not work, older version will be kept, so user will 
> just transparantly use that.

And it seems somewhat closer to stop falling back to the Qt images on my flash.

> This way we will make debian installable always, and without black magic at 
> user's side.

Sounds good to me. It is beyond me to set it up, though.

I'll inform you about my progress with debootstrap - it failed yesterday without the
--include install-info, after a long long time.

Many greetings

Steffen (still at  Resolving dependencies of base packages...)