installer integration

[Phillip Susi]

Colin Watson wrote:
> Not all udebs have names ending in "-udeb"; that suffix is generally
> only there when it's necessary to avoid confusion with normal packages.
> If you're looking at the partman source package, that's a red herring,
> as it's an aggregate package I put together to simplify the process of
> building the live CD-based installer.
> 
> The "partman" actually used in the installer is composed of lots of
> pieces; 'apt-get source partman' in Dapper will get you most of them as
> it happens (look in the source/ directory). However, the actual source
> package you're asking about is probably partman-base.
> 

I see... that explains things.

> My inclination would in fact be not to touch partman at all, at least
> not for running this utility that configures device-mapper. Instead, I'd
> just put /sbin/dmraid in a dmraid-udeb without any postinst scripts or
> anything like that (add a stanza for dmraid-udeb to debian/control with
> XC-Package-Type: udeb and install the binary to
> debian/dmraid-udeb/sbin/dmraid, built in a second pass with -Os and
> without klibc or libselinux), and have disk-detect (from the hw-detect
> source package) run it when looking for disks. That way, the check in
> disk-detect for whether you have any partitionable media won't fire
> mistakenly on dmraid-requiring systems. I'm happy to help you with this.
> 

Yea, I've got the udeb setup like that ( just not with -Os ). 
disk-detect sounds like what I need, I'll have a look at it tonight, 
thanks.

> By the way, to answer another question I saw in #ubuntu-devel
> scrollback, no, the installer doesn't use initramfs-tools or
> mkinitramfs. It has its own build system, which can be found in the
> debian-installer source package. disk-detect isn't in the installer
> initrd, though, so I don't expect that you'll need to modify the
> installer initrd anyway.
> 

Yea, I managed to figure that out from looking over the d-i sources.

> Also, the easiest way to test installer changes is often just to edit
> the running installer on the fly. For example, in this case you could
> create your dmraid-udeb and put it somewhere network-accessible; then,
> after the installer has brought the network up, wget the package,
> install it with 'udpkg -i', and 'nano /bin/disk-detect' to make that
> script do whatever you need. Voilà, instant testing without having to
> mess about with creating and burning CD images.
> 
> You generally seem to be asking installer questions on IRC when all the
> people who know the installer best (including me) are fast asleep. I'm
> happy to answer questions on this list or in private mail, and I suspect
> timezones are such that you'll get better results that way.
> 
> Cheers,
>