README for those who want to hack on debian-cd
----------------------------------------------

Organisation :
--------------

The main source is in the Debian svn. If you want to hack on debian-cd
and if you want to send me patches, please work on the latest version
available in svn.

auth: svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-cd/trunk
anon: svn://svn.debian.org/debian-cd/trunk
web:  http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-cd

If you want to discuss anything related to the debian-cd development,
mail the debian-cd@lists.debian.org mailing list where all people
interested in the debian-cd development are subscribed.

Technical details :
-------------------

The Makefile which is the main directory will be used to launch
each step of the install process. Try to comment each target of
the makefile so that other can know why it's here. If you need
specific programs (perl or shell scripts), please put them
in the tools directory.

The tasks directory will contain files listing packages (the
order in which package are listed is important, each package
added will be added to the current CD until it's full).

The data dir will contains useful data (not directly task 
related) like the master file from boot-floppies and so on.

Each tool is self-documented, if you want to know what it
does read the sources (they are scripts).

Debugging debian-cd :
---------------------

If you want to read more about what YACS is doing you can set
the VERBOSE environment variable to 1, 2 or 3 depending on the
level of noise that you want.

Some scripts generates their own log files in the temp dir. You 
can take a look at them if you want to check for warnings 
and so on.
Log files :
- $TDIR/$CODENAME/log.list2cds
- $TDIR/$CODENAME/make_disc_trees.log

TODO list :
-----------
+ put the doc directory only on the first binary CD
+ a way to force the inclusion of packages (even broken)
+ possibility to add project/* to the last CD

Bugs / Problems :
-----------------
* make list will not add contrib packages if you do not
  select NONFREE too. That's because contrib is broken
  without non-free. And the building process only allow
  functional packages to be added.

Technical choices :
-------------------

For the multiboot on the first CD of an i386 CD set, we had two options
isolinux and el-torito native multiboot. We selected isolinux
because it works well and it lets you display information to the user.
The el-torito multiboot just displays a menu with each item
being the same "2.88Mb boot image". Both multiboot mechanism may
not work on older hardware with very old BIOSes however the el-torito
one works a bit better because it's usually able to boot the first choice
without displaying the menu then.