Possibility of accepting a network-based installer of Ubuntu as an official flavor?

[Steve Langasek]

Hi Aaron,

Łukasz and Dan have covered the details of the work in progress, so just a
couple of notes:

On Thu, Feb 23, 2023 at 09:53:16PM -0600, Aaron Rainbolt wrote:
> My idea is to either write my own installer or use a customized version of
> the existing Debian installer, and package it into a "flavor" of its own,

debian-installer is a no-go for future Ubuntu development.  It has impact on
the maintenance of a large number of core packages, most significantly the
kernel, and we have made changes to dpkg in Ubuntu to categorically skip
building udebs.  mini.iso dropped out of the archive as part of an explicit
decision to discontinue support for d-i/udebs.

Fortunately, we've identified a path forward for addressing these use cases
that doesn't require this.

> which would be capable of installing any supported version of any official
> flavor of Ubuntu. The "flavor" would be able to be held in a very small ISO
> file (preferably CD sized), and it would download and install all of the
> packages that make up the Ubuntu system at runtime.

I would not consider this a "flavor", any more than the previous mini.iso
was a flavor.  It's more flavor*less* and thus I don't see it as requiring
to go through the community flavor approval process as it's not intended to
be a version of Ubuntu, merely an artifact that is used to install Ubuntu.

That said, unlike the previous mini.iso, we fully intend that this be a
supported and tested image!  And crucially, unlike the mini.iso which
bypassed all of the installer logic in favor of raw package selection and
therefore gave a different - unsupported - install result vs the installer
on our full flavor images, this new mini iso will boot the actual flavor
installer and so any divergences in the installed system would simply be a
bug.

Cheers,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                   https://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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