inamerrata

Quite some time ago now, I started hacking on cross-strapping support for debootstrap — that is, you start bootstrapping your install non-natively (eg, a Hurd install on a Linux system, a powerpc install on an i386, or a Debian install on a Solaris system), then boot into your half unpacked system, and reinvoke debootstrap to finish the job.

It got mostly implemented, then left to hang while I did other things, nominally waiting for an updated makedev. I went and had a look again last year when I started playing with darcs and forward ported bits of it, but not quite enough to have it work properly.

So third time lucky — I’ve been poking around at it again over the long weekend, and it’s getting a fair bit further this time. I decided to setup a CodeWiki to keep track of some of the things I’m hacking on, something like tridge’s junkcode but with a different focus.

The cross-strapping part’s working again, and a reasonable chunk of other stuff also, such as mostly syncing with Ubuntu, automatically resolving missing dependencies within the base system, merging the buildd variant into the main sid script to reduce duplicate code, and a first pass at the code support for determining required/base packages entirely automatically.

Of course, that latter one’s had some code scattered around my filesystem for ages too — it’s been waiting on ftpmaster getting the ability to specify tags in the Packages files on a per-arch basis. That’s still waiting on a fix to Bug#225947, which has had a patch in the BTS for over a year now, and which mvo has, in theory, cleaned up recently. In any case, I decided waiting was boring, and put my Debian ftpmaster hat on tonight and munged the required/important priorities to match required/base for i386 at least; we’ll see if that worked or not tomorrow.

Anyway, in the meantime:

Uploading via ftp debootstrap_0.3.0.dsc: done.
Uploading via ftp debootstrap_0.3.0.tar.gz: done.
Uploading via ftp debootstrap-udeb_0.3.0_i386.udeb: done.
Uploading via ftp debootstrap_0.3.0_i386.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp debootstrap_0.3.0_i386.changes: done.

Let’s see what breaks.