Ideas to Move Debian Installer Forward

Speaker: Alper Nebi Yasak

Track: Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure

Type: Long talk (45 minutes)

Room: Somin

Time: Aug 02 (Fri): 15:30

Duration: 0:45

Debian Installer is a very complex project with many parts. Every piece involved has its own idiosyncrasies due to its age and the constraints under which it was designed to work. I’m not sure I understand all it needs to be, but in my mind there’s a harsh critic who points out a lot of things and a junior engineer who dreams that things could be better. Some examples of my gripes with it are:

  • Installer itself is an OS somewhat different than Debian
  • Installer packages (“udebs”) are very special
  • Sidesteps buildd process a bit, needs internet access
  • Cannot build in parallel, or cross-build
  • Needs multi-project builds for full installation media
  • Debconf template-based UI control feels weird

I could extend that list by a lot. I keep occasionally thinking about what I would like the Debian Installer to be, what could be done to get it to that point. In this talk I’ll try to get what I have in mind to a coherent roadmap, so that we can at least evaluate if the necessary work would be worth it.

URLs