Debian first experience made a bit easier...

[Nikita V. Youshchenko]

> I'm quite glad with the new E17 and Zhone packages in the main Debian
> archive. The only package you really need from the (still enabled by
> default) pkg-fso archive is the kernel, so this is very good progress.
> The kernel is of course a hard thing and involves work from all
> Openmoko kernel developers who have time to get stuff upstream, but
> after that it would be not a big way to proper Debian installer
> support - which eventually even leads to a Debian stable release with
> official support for FreeRunner.

Doing debian install with (c)debootstrap, as current install.sh does and as 
debian installer does, although being a standard way, is somewhat 
questionable on slow devices such as freerunner. This is plainly slow, 
compared to reflashing or archive unpacking. Also it is vulnerable to 
temporary archive breakages, as the current story with dpkg 1.15.4 shows. 
Because of that, and also given quite a big challenge to make d-i working 
on freerunner itself (no keyboard, no serial console, etc), it may be much 
better to look not at d-i porting, but at archive preparation on server 
and untarring on user device. Optionally, such a process could be 
implemented as a d-i module that will run instead of (c)debootstrap.

And, after all, installation is not the only thing that should work :)
Besides installation, there is still a long path to make debian of 
freerunner as usable as debian should be.

There is large, and constantly increasing number of freerunner software. 
Att hose need to be packaged for debian. If they won't, user will end with 
instaslling unpackaged software and breaking their systems.

Remenber, zhone is not intended to be end-user phone app. We should package 
paroli, and/or litephone, and/or shr phone tools.

Also, something should be done such that packages provide good user 
experience just after installation.

For example, it's nice that mokomaze is in debian, but if you install it 
and run it, you will get your screen blanked after a minute. To avoid 
that, one needs to start mokomaze under fsoraw wrapper. Making this happen 
automatically while staying within debian policy could be a challenge: 
debian package is not for freerunner only, modifying files installed by 
other packages (hi hi appraw) is denied by policy, etc

And it was just an example. Another one: after aptitude install mplayer, I 
get mplayer icon in illume, that launches mplayer gui, next to useless on 
freerunner. But if/when we will have intone packaged, we will want to have 
mplayer package installed. So somehow we should do that on freerunner, 
mplayer icon does not appear. And do so without altering mplayer package 
and staying within policy.

Nikita
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