Post-Etch ("Lenny") D-I development
This page is primarily maintained by the D-I release manager. You are welcome to add items on this page, but if you do, please add your nick or name in brackets.
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NOTE: this is not a wish list
Main goals
- Consolidation
Reduce memory usage, particularly by cdebconf and translations - done, see http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2007/06/msg00531.html
- Improve performance and consistency
- IPv6 support
Major issues
Persistent device naming for disks DebanBug:389881
Support for installing Debian on hardware requiring drivers/firmware not in the regular kernel images - done
includes supplemental repository support for udebs started by Bastian Blank, probably won't happen for beta3; work parked in http://people.debian.org/~waldi
General improvements
Support to load and install from more than one full CD or DVD - done
- Implement/improve/test IPv6 support
proposed patch for IPv6 support in busybox wget: 395839
- Find replacement for the ISC DHCP client in d-i
- we've now switched to dhcp3 (from dhcp v2), but that is really too big for d-i
- busybox has something but that will probably need to be extended to avoid regressions
klibc has also a DHCP client, it even can identify itself with vendor id "d-i"
FJP: but do we want to use klibc in images when we already have libc?
maks: ipconfig - BOOTP/DHCP client for klibc can be compiled against libc6.what about udhcpc? [PerOlofsson]
dhcpcd is likely to fit well. It's smaller than dhclient and well maintained upstream and in Debian [?SimonKelley]
another option is tiny-dhcp [nyu]
Switch from console-data to console-setup. Status page: ../ConsoleSetupSwitch
Add support for dmraid - done as experimental feature
Improve support for Intel-based Apple MacBook systems; current support is a bit of a kludge and needs restructuring (cjwatson has patches)
- Make grub installer show a list of disks to install on if more than one disk controller is detected; lilo already has code for selecting a target which might be nice to use as well.
Make os-prober readonly (418163)
Might be better to put "blockdev" in busybox than to get a new udeb, see http://people.ubuntu.com/~cjwatson/busybox.blockdev.diff
- Some filesystems might ignore the RO flag, but it's still better than nothing:
- Taking care of the flag: ext3, reiserfs, xfs,
- NOT taking care:
- jfs: seems to handle the "ro" option correctly
- ntfs: seems to call ntfs_write_volume_flags unconditionnaly, see fs/ntfs/super.c:526)
- hfsplus: driver does not support journaled HFS+ at the moment, so no issues
- General cleanup
removal of 2.4 kernel support - mostly done
- general code cleanup, e.g. old backwards compatibility hacks
remove all uses of devfs device nodes - see DebianInstaller/RemoveDevFS - done
- Various
- Finish last bits of udeb transition
- Change "link in /" to "link in /boot"?
Re-number XB-Installer-Menu-Item with 3 digits to let more room for custom installer components. [?JeremyBobbio] - done
Cleaner solution for including libgcc1 when needed for G-I (373253)
Get rid of librt again in glibc-udeb by compiling it statically in xfsprogs-udeb (see 381881)
partman
Use debconf's Choices-C option to avoid logic based on translated strings - done
- Merge ext3 support into partman-basicfilesystems so it is available by default in lowmem installations
Try to get some issues in libparted fixed: 406680, 328629, 377263
- Implement "resize partition and install to free space" in guided partitioning (cjwatson: Ubuntu has patches for this, though they have a bit of undesirable hardcoding of the expected space needed and don't have ideal recipe handling)
Make partman-md behave more like other partman packages: allow devices to be deallocated and do not wipe/recreate config files at each restart, fixes 393728 and friends [DavidHärdeman] - done
partman-crypto: improve entropy handling, add support for keys-on-removable-devices, allow devices to be deallocated [DavidHärdeman]
partman-crypto: Allow a user to re-use an existing encrypted filesystem without data loss (ex: /home, /srv, etc) [?BenjaminSeidenberg]
Only offer LVM and maybe RAID if sufficient free memory is available, as with crypto. [DavidHärdeman] - done
This should perhaps be accompanied with a mechanism to force the first lowmem level at boot time ("OK, I don't have sufficient memory, but LVM/RAID/crypto is more important to me than translations") - done
Kill lvmcfg and mdcfg (and partconf would be nice too) [DavidHärdeman]
Add RAID10 and RAID6 support; madduck has indicated interest in working on this - done
- Maybe support partitioning a RAID device; madduck has indicated interest in working on this
Support relatime - done
... and maybe (selectively) enable relatime/noatime by default (436785) [fjp]
user-setup
Include some password strength checking code 364526 [ChristianPerrier] jfs offered to implement this
graphical installer
Proposed enhancements
- Split the initrd into three
- the 1st containing the basic system
the 2nd containing drivers for the latest hardware (so only this "initrd" needs modification for new hardware)
FJP: is this even realistic?the 3rd being language support, which only gets loaded if enough memory is available - more detailed plans for this
- Build system
- Add a new build target or method to build all packages from the SVN and build an image with them rather than build with uploaded packages. This would speed up interactive reviews of translations as well as other coordinated changes. Of course, it would break often..:-)
Integration of http frontend developed by Attilio (DebianInstaller/WebInstaller)?
Support for installing a server with Xen instances as suggested by Russel Coker at LCA?
Extend accessibility support - discussion
Support for the miBoot bootloader as the recommended method to boot ?OldWorld PowerMac machines. [AurelienGerome]
Other
- Further develop cdebconf for use in the installed system (as replacement for debconf)
Integration of Debian-Installer Loader [?RobertMillan] - done