Re: network installer uses HTTP instead of FTP to load base2_2.tgz
> Petr Cech <cech@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> writes:
>
> > it seems you are not getting, how Debian works. It's documented, that FTP is
> > NOT supported for instalation from b-f. And as I said, write a small program,
> > which can download a file from an FTP server and the installation will support
> > this.
>
> Actually, someone would just need to hack in
> utilities/dbootstrap/netfetch and others to get a snarf interface
> working. Snarf was the program we were looking to use as an FTP (and
> another HTTP) providing element.
My old slink installer used snarf to install from ftp and http. Actually
it implemented a virtual file system which can navigate and copy files
from a real (mounted) filesystem or a remote filesystem accessed via ftp
or http. So you can simply write:
do_cp $INSTALL_BASE /target/tmp/base.tgz
and it works whether $INSTALL_BASE is a plain file or an ftp/http url.
This is how b-f should handle this issue.
Unfortunately b-f and apt don't support the same install media: b-f
support nfs but not ftp, apt/dpkg support ftp and not nfs.
In my opinion they should support the same media, so we should add ftp
to b-f, which seems a trivial task as they already support http, and
nfs to apt, which is a big win when installing on machines with small
harddisks. Of course one can mount the nfs filesystem by hand but having
it done automatically by apt or dpkg would make things far easier.
--
Massimo Dal Zotto
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