Debimg for Ubuntu Intrepid Alternate Disks?

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 07:44:14PM +0200, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> The GPL-3 licensed [http://wiki.debian.org/DebImg debimg] project aims
> to create a replacement for debian-cd written in Python, able to create
> basic netinst disks in less than 5 seconds.
> 
> debimg uses a dependency resolver written in Python, which is able to
> resolve the dependencies of all packages in Debian in about 0.5 seconds.

Somebody would have to replace this with germinate, or else merge the
appropriate code from debimg into germinate; it's not a good idea to
diverge different bits of the distribution on something this
fundamental.

> At the current state, it is already possible to build basic netinst
> disks in less than 5 seconds. It currently supports creation of disks
> for i386 and amd64 architectures, support for documentation (including
> README.*) is missing. It supports Jigdo.
> 
> This matches almost the requirements of Ubuntu, I could add the missing
> stuff.
> 
> I think it would be worth to use debimg to build the alternate disks for
> all official architectures. (as others are not supported yet by debimg).

What are the advantages of this over our current system? So far, it
sounds like there are at least some regressions (support for
architectures other than amd64/i386, and almost certainly the need to
port all our painstakingly-developed customisations to it); what would
we gain to make this effort worthwhile?

I'm no enormous fan of debian-cd, understand, but it sounds like a lot
of work to shift over to anything else too.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]