Using smart with multi disc install

Gustavo Niemeyer gustavo at niemeyer.net
Mon Dec 18 03:48:24 PST 2006


Hello Christian,

> Right now, we are moving towards the next CCux Linux release. This
> would be the seconf one after 0.9.8 that uses smart in the
> installation process too.

That's very cool!

> The big question now really getting more and more interesting how it
> could be solved to have 2 Installation CDs. As of now, there is only
> one, but the packages and their individual dependencies are getting
> more and more, so this really needs to be thought about.
> 
> Any ideas how this could be done with smart?

Smart has a nice system to deal with that situation, and there's a
good reason for that.  My plan was to use Smart in Conectiva's
installer when I wrote it.  After debugging and polishing the
installation procedure many times in Conectiva, I was trying to build
a method that wouldn't require so much effort preparing the
installation CDs.

The result is a system that:

- Only needs each CD inserted once;
- Doesn't care about the order in which you provide CDs;
- Will always keep the system in a "safe" state when exchanging CDs;
- Caches packages that can't be installed without additional
  dependencies into the hard disk until these dependencies are
  available (IOW, the CD containing them is inserted).

With that in mind, I belive you'll find it somewhat easy to handle
this situation.  Maybe there are a few details here and there to be
handled, since this hasn't been used after I implemented it, but it
shouldn't be hard, and I'll be happy to see it working.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net



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