Hi, On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 03:08:19PM +0200, Michael Tautschnig wrote: > I'm not really happy with the idea of making fai-quickstart (or rather, any of > the FAI packages) architecture-specific/restricted. Probably Sebastian could > comment best what needs to be done to make it work; I know that we had FAI > working with Sun/SPARC systems, but that required running rarpd.
I have not investigated this any further, so, I'm afraid, I cannot provide any more information about that at the moment. > In all cases it > seems that the dependencies are architecture specific, but it's not the > package > that is architecture specific! Well, yes, but that makes the package architecture specific as well. The whole purpose of fai-quickstart is (imho) that you can easily setup a basic FAI server installation. If that installation is not able to boot any clients because of missing dependencies then the whole setup does not make any sense. > I'd see two more options here: > - Add fai-quickstart-i386, fai-quickstart-powerpc, ... packages, just for the > sake of handling dependencies. Note that all of these would be Architecture: > all and wouldn't conflict. Well, I suppose that those packages would provide the appropriate setup for the specified architecture, right? So Architecture: all really does not make any sense to me. Imho, those packages would also have to take care of architecture specific setups else we'd just be fooling the users by hiding missing dependencies. > - Don't depend on any of the architecture-specific stuff, but instead ask the > user to install it when running fai-setup (with the option of having > fai-setup > do this automatically). Well, the problem is that we currently do not know about alternatives for the other architectures, so we cannot tell the user and thus cannot provide the necessary setup / information on those architectures - which is the whole point of that package. Anyway, Holger found a follow-up message to (the unrelated) bug #497270 [1] which talks about the syslinux package which, at some time, will be split into an architecture dependent and an architecture independent part. The latter could then be used as a dependency for fai-quickstart as that's all that's required by FAI. Also, when talking about this bug yesterday, we agreed that this package could actually be replaced by about two lines in the FAI guide. Thomas hesitated with a final decision about that as there might be other reasons for the package's existence. Anyway, the package currently does the following only: * by depending on further packages pulls in all required packages * copy example config files from /usr/share/doc/fai-doc to /etc/fai All of that could be described in the guide as well, so I don't see any reason why we should keep this package. The appropriate section in the guide could be titled "FAI quickstart" so it could easily be referenced - just like the package. Cheers, Sebastian [1] http://bugs.debian.org/497270#39 -- Sebastian "tokkee" Harl +++ GnuPG-ID: 0x8501C7FC +++ http://tokkee.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin
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