README for those who want to hack on yacs/debian-cd --------------------------------------------------- Organisation : -------------- The main source is in the Debian CVS. If you want to hack on debian-cd and if you want to send me patches, please work on the latest version available in the CVS. http://cvs.debian.org/debian-cd/ $ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/debian-boot co debian-cd If you want to discuss anything related to the debian-cd development, you can contact me directly or, better, you can 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 YACS : ---------------- 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-$ARCH/log.list2cds - $TDIR/$CODENAME-SRC/log.cds2src 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 + check the source files on the mirror (with Sources.gz) when doing make mirrorcheck 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. This is a non-issue since people may still boot on CD 2,3,4,5 with the usual boot method if the multiboot doesn't work.