Re: new distribution

On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 14:30 -0600, Klaus Weidner wrote:
> I have strong doubts about this approach - once you start stripping it
> down it's definitely not "pure debian" anymore, so I don't see the point
> of doing it that way instead of using one of the existing "minimal"
> installations that are designed to run in flash ROMs of around that size.
> 
I couldnt find any that are that way, it would be far easier for me to
just download something and be done with it rather than make my own.  I
know that it would break true debian becuase a lot of the tools would be
replaced by busybox (which isnt always as comptable, re mount and loop
devices)..

Can you suggest something that is minimal?


> The point of a Debian install is that you can "apt-get" additional
> packages from the standard Debian archives, and once you start doing that
> you'll almost immediately pull in enough dependencies to require more
> storage.
> 
Yes, and that option is left open.  The main goal of this is for my
personal system, if someone else wanted it then fine.  The problem that
I am having is that familiar is somewhat broken and for months problems
with their packages have been ignored (over 6 months) so I did not want
to rely on that as a basis for the system.  I also saw it as a waste of
my flash storage to have familiar on there when I wasnt going to use it
(I plan on using my 1GB SD card for much of the installation, but as of
yet I havent discovered a boot loader that will let me boot off SD, LAB
has aparently not progressed much in recent times according to one of
the devleopers - not advised unless you have a JTAG cable) ...


> The "woody" pocketworkstation package had still fit into a 64MB
> partition, but additional dependencies needed for the "sarge" build made
> that impossible, the new minimum is around 120MB uncompressed.

Well your minimal had stuff like gcc which isnt required, one of the
things I was willing to give up to have a core in flash, and the rest
would be stored elsewhere.  The reason I wanted to do it this way was so
that if the SD fails I still have a somewhat usable system.  Until the
SD drivers stablize a little I didnt want to commit to all or nothing.
And with the latest handhelds.org release they got worse ...  After
trying to fix one problem I was having I was thinking about checking the
status of the 2.6 series (I feel that would fix several other issues I
am having, specifically with POSIX compliance) and possibly porting the
drivers for my device to 2.6, if nothing else I get to use mine :)


> Why don't you like the pivot_root option? Do you also object to booting a
> kernel with modules in an "initrd" which would IMHO be similar? The end
> result is that the booted system won't have any dependencies left on the
> originally booted system. I can understand not liking the "chroot"
> approach, but pivot_root is different. I'd consider it to be much less
> hackish than a manually split and minimized pseudo-Debian (no offense
> intended).
> 

Well I wasnt planning on it being split just different partitions, the
type of thing that admins did back when I was starting out (now most it
seem just make 1 large partition and toss everything in there, lazy?
big cheap disks?  that is how everyone else did it?  whatever the reason
nost dont seem to partition disks anymore)..

I dont like the pivot_root concept becuase it relies on something being
on my flash that is no longer used, which seems a waste of space.  

I had though of initrd as a solution at one point, however not last
night when I decided to look into this approach.  I could blame it on
the fact that I have been up for way too long, but that would just be an
excuse..

And I agree that it would be a minimized pseudo-Debian, but that still
appeared better than the other options were.  

I will rethink initrd now, becuase as I write this rather long email I
am thinking that I could make an easier solution that way.  

At least for now.
-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com

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