Full installer Preseed reference?

[Josef Wolf]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 09:42:22AM -0400, Tom H wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 3:16 AM, Lukas Erlacher <erlacher at in.tum.de> wrote:
> >
> > how can I find out which commands are supported in the
> > debian-installer preseed process?
> > [ ... ]
> Good luck with that.
> 
> I've given up on preseed because, even though I'd set up a good
> preseed file that I could adapt for different situations, there's no
> complete reference, different versions have different behaviors (as we
> saw recently on this list) and it's impossible to specify exact
> partition sizes.

Yes, it's kind of PITA. I am doing this for about 10 years. With every new
release, something breaks and you have to find out why/how it breaks and how
to get it working again. Neither documentation nor google are of much help in
this process, so you have to pollute the mailing lists to find out what's
going on.

To be fair, it's not only preseed that breaks from one release to the
other. There are also changes in d-i, in the basic system (e.g. naming of
devices) or even changes to command line options of important system commands
(e.g. apt)

> I now have tarfiles, like ubuntu-core, that I unpack onto filesystem
> and then run scripts to finish the setup.

Is this something like debootstrap?

-- 
Josef Wolf
jw at raven.inka.de