Bug#1031696: Use of symbolic links in non-free ISO images breaks file system transposition support

Followup-For: Bug #1031696
X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected]
Control: reassign -1 debian-cd
Control: tags -1 moreinfo

I forgot to mention: thanks, Pete, for testing this UEFI file transposition support
with bookworm's d-i alpha 2.

We're all volunteers and I'm no expert with the CD image build process, so
there's no guarantee we can improve the behaviour for the bookworm release
(the firmware-nonfree archive is relatively new, and there may be bugs as it
is introduced) - but let's see what we can do.


Something that symlinks can do is to allow image creators to save space by
by de-duplicating files.  The 'debian-bookworm-DI-alpha2-amd64-netinst.iso' has
142M of content under 'pool/non-free-firmware/' according to 'du -sh'.  That's
about a fifth of the netinst image size.

To state my understanding of the problem, you'd like either:

  - The file symlinks in the relevant CD images to be replaced by file contents

  OR

  - The result of copying the filesystem from the CD image to a FAT32-format
    filesystem to emit files instead of symlinks


A question: what operating system(s) and/or filesystem copying methods are
you seeing the problem with?