Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & .. (original) (raw)

Jeremie Koenig wrote:

The plan was to request a sarge-ignore tag on the "d-i build-depends on miboot, which is in contrib", and try to find a better solution for next releases.

This is the first I've heard of this. Has the sarge-ignore status of the GFDL docs really created such a slippery slope? I doubt it.

Sven Luther wrote:

Well, the solution would be to force add the miboot stuff to the debian-installer svn tree, and use it to build. This would make debian-installer contrib/non-free though, which is why i asked for debain-legal help.

Note that one solution for this would be to make an exception for such bootloader stuff, and have them in the debian-installer SVN, in a boot-loader directory or something, and use them directly. This will not break autobuild, and everything would be fine, except when you upload said stuff to main.

That would violate the TOS for alioth. Do not check non-free code into the d-i subversion repository.

You are free to set up your own fork of the debian-installer package, call it "debian-installer-non-free", and upload it to non-free or contrib, and arrange to build the non-free boot images from it. That would be one way.

Another way might be to use the debian-installer package to build images with a dummy, free boot loader (all zero's, say), and provide a third-party tool to make the resulting images really bootable, by applying the real boot loader to them. The resulting images would not be official d-i images, but I think it would be ok to include the non-bootable ones in the archive, with an appropriate bug filed on d-i about their non-bootable status.

-- see shy jo

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