needing the CD after installation for apt-get installs bugs me

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 04:03:29PM +0800, John wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> >There are only a few packages on the CD which are not installed by
> >default, and they are provided so that they are available to users
> >who do not have Internet access.  Several of them are provided for
> >the purpose of establishing an Internet connection where special
> >software is needed.
> >
> >The ideal solution would be to cache them on the hard disk so that
> >the CD is not needed; I think that Colin has looked at this, but it
> >is non-trivial to implement at this time.
> 
> Am I naive to think this would do it?
> atp-get -yd install ....

The reason it's non-trivial is that doing it smoothly before the first
reboot implies doing it from the installer, where many of the tools
you're used to aren't available or don't work as expected. For example,
using apt-get in that fashion leaves the .debs in
/var/cache/apt/archives, and the first thing that base-config does when
it starts up is to delete everything in /var/cache/apt/archives; we want
to keep this behaviour, since it means that .debs for base packages that
are already installed get cleaned out.

There are various alternatives I can think of, but at this point we will
probably leave them until after Warty.

-- 
Colin Watson                                    [cjwatson at canonical.com]