grml-debootstrap icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
grml-debootstrap copied to clipboard

Clarify design goals

Open zeha opened this issue 11 months ago • 3 comments

Need to clarify what grml-debootstrap should be, and which usecases it should support.

From our in-person discussion, I think we want:

  • clear commitment to being an installer for pure Debian systems
  • installed system should mostly work like Debian
  • should provide clear recipes
    • VM image (like Debian cloud image)
    • inside VM install
    • baremetal server
    • "Debian Developer laptop/desktop" (excluding any graphical things, to be left to the user)
  • partitioning should be part of the recipe
  • bootloader should be automatic and have an opinionated choice
  • amd64 VM images should support EFI + bios boot
  • archs: amd64, arm64
  • target suites: unstable, testing, stable, oldstable, oldoldstable (cf #282)
  • all features should be CI tested
  • dialog frontend and command line
  • "featureitis" should go away
  • full encapsulation of called tools
  • customize hook for the in-chroot phase

zeha avatar Jan 29 '25 11:01 zeha

Features we think which can or should go away:

  • --iso (can) - uninteresting to us to take debian packages from an iso
  • DEBOOTSTRAP=... (should)
  • DEBOOTSTRAP_OPTS=... (should)
  • ?

zeha avatar Jan 29 '25 17:01 zeha

As mentioned in https://github.com/grml/grml-debootstrap/pull/309#issuecomment-2624491579, for our Debian derivative distributions we need variable DEBOOTSTRAP and/or DEBOOTSTRAP_OPTS (as proper bash array).

adrelanos avatar Jan 30 '25 13:01 adrelanos

We also know that we need support for per-release package lists, as the available packages and useful defaults change per Debian release.

zeha avatar Feb 25 '25 14:02 zeha