[Vmdebootstrap-devel] Namespace issues

[Neil Williams]

On Mon, 9 Nov 2015 08:26:56 +1100
"Michael ." <keltoiboy at gmail.com> wrote:

> For what its worth I tried to do a clean Jessie-Live install last
> week and it didn't install because my PC is UEFI. I then downloaded a
> regular Debian Jessie DVD  (and even a Wheezy CD) and they both
> installed on my UEFI system without any problems. If there are Jessie
> Live DVDs that will install onto UEFI (not hybrid UEFI/Legacy)
> systems it would be very helpful if there was some up to date
> documentation on it.

The request for UEFI support in live is very old and no work has been
done. We started this work at Debconf15 and brought UEFI support to
vmdebootstrap (amongst a raft of other improvements) in less than a
week. We then got back to doing other stuff until the minidebconf and
the work to fix the known problems with live-build took less than two
days.

Avoiding fixing something is not a solution - if essential
functionality is blocked for long enough by inactivity, someone is just
going to do it better. That's the point of free software.

> With regards to the other matter that this topic was initiated about
> I, personally, feel instead of starting a new project the group from
> the new project would be much better off assisting with an already
> well established project.

The debian-cd team have struggled with the live codebase for several
releases. This is an effort from the debian-cd team to fix persistent
problems with preparing the files for every Debian release and point
release upon a testable and reliable base.
 
> On 9 November 2015 at 00:11, Fathi Boudra <fabo at debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 1:33 PM, Neil Williams <codehelp at debian.org>
> > wrote:  
> > > On Sat, 07 Nov 2015 10:40:36 +0100
> > > Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann at progress-technologies.com> wrote:
> > >  
> > >> Hi Ian,
> > >>
> > >> nice to see you're interested in live-* stuff. however, please
> > >> consider renaming this package (and also src:live-support), it
> > >> invades/hijacks the Debian Live namespace.  
> > >
> > > There is an explicit reason for this. vmdebootstrap is being
> > > extended explicitly to provide support for a replacement for
> > > live-build.  
> >
> > It's also hostile to an existing project and give the impression
> > that live-build is obsolete/deprecated/unmaintained.

Necessary support has been ignored for too long. Support, it turns out,
which takes a comparatively small amount of time to implement. Iain is
new to vmdebootstrap (but not debian-cd) and turned the whole thing
around within the vmdebootstrap sprint. debian-cd have been asking for
this support since before Jessie was released.

> > > This work is happening within the debian-cd team to be able to
> > > solve the existing problems with live-build. These problems
> > > include reliability issues, lack of multiple architecture support
> > > and lack of UEFI support. vmdebootstrap has all of these, we do
> > > use support from live-boot and live-config as these are out of
> > > the scope for vmdebootstrap.  
> >
> > Which reliability issues precisely and where have they been
> > discussed publicly or even reported?

Steve McIntyre has more information on that, he's been a bit busy since
this thread developed - organising a miniDebConf at his workplace.

> > Lack of multiple architecture support? I'm using it successfully and
> > reliably on i386/amd64/armhf/arm64 architectures.
> > Can you expand on the missing UEFI support or provide some pointer
> > on what vmdebootstrap does? There's live-build users using UEFI with
> > live-build.

So why hasn't UEFI support been delivered for the debian-cd team usage?

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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