On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 03:28:08AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote: >Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> writes: > >> 8. Running without a local mirror >> >> A common complaint is that debian-cd basically requires a local >> mirror to be useful. This is not ideal for many end users, who may >> be trying to create small custom CDs and don't have the disk space >> for all the Debian packages needed. It should be feasible to make >> debian-cd work with remote mirrors, grabbing just the pieces it >> needs. This _may_ need custom work, or it may be possible to use >> one of several packages suggested to create a partial mirror. I'm >> actually leaning more towards custom code, perhaps even some >> tweaks to pipe the data into mkisofs as it is needed to save local >> disk. > >Given a list of package needed for the CD it is trivial to create a >partial mirror using one of various methods. If that mirror is then >used to hardlink or symlink the files into the CD dirs no space is >wasted. > >To save more space you would have to pipe the files and live with the >problem that you can't reread a file, e.g. to run apt-ftparchive or >md5sum over it. You have to get each file as it comes and pipe it to >all the things that need to read it at the same time. That might be >quite complicated. We're planning on avoiding most of that - all the packages and source files have MD5 entries we can read. And apt-ftparchive is too slow, so we're going to avoid it. >What would be real great though would be to combine this with the >realy realy fast jigdo file creation. If you don't create iso images >you don't even need the debs. Just get the Packages/Sources files, >create jidgo, done. Would that be possible? Creating isos without >local mirror could then go this way and run jigdo to create images. You're psychic - that's exactly what we've been thinking about. There are some issues to think about in this scheme, for example the fact that some files _have_ to be downloaded as they will go directly into the template file as raw data. But it might be possible to generate skeleton jigdo files in a few seconds per CD if we get this right... :-) -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com You lock the door And throw away the key There's someone in my head but it's not me
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