[glug-t] Anaconda for debian

This is some interesting news.
It's realted to porting of Red Hat's Anaconda installer tool to Debian,
and a modification of Debian's APT package tool which will allow it to
use both RedHat and Debian packages.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200310/msg01880.h
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Hi all,

(Please forward to other lists as appropriate.)

We at Progeny haven't been terribly good of late at keeping the
community in the loop on the status of our many Debian-related projects
(PGI and Discover in particular, which have gotten the
most community interest). This message aims to correct the situation;
please contact me with any comments or questions.

First or all, we are in the process of moving all of our projects from a
Progeny-internal CVS repository to a community-accessible Subversion
repository; the migration should be complete within the next couple of
weeks. This move will make it easier for the community to participate
directly in our projects, even when a particular project isn't currently
on the high priority list for us. These projects include: discover and
discover-data, the configlets and accompanying modules (etherconf,
aptconf, localeconf, timezoneconf, etc.) and our package signing work
(apt-checksigs and debsigs-verify). 

Second, we have been working on several new projects over the last
several months that may be of interest to the Debian community.

We have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian; essentially,we
replaced calls to RPM with calls to APT, and replaced Red Hat-specific
configuration hooks with calls into the configlets and
debconf. We have also written a tool called PickAx that facilitates the
creation of Anaconda-based Debian installation CD sets.

We are also working with various parties to add/merge RPM support into
the mainline APT, to allow Debian- and RPM-based distributions to be
managed using a single APT codebase, and possibly even to allow Debian
and RPM packages to coexist side by side. This work also aims to merge
our various APT extensions (e.g., support for authenticated APT repos)
into the mainline APT.

It is our hope that a distribution-independent Anaconda and a
distribution-independent APT (plus, eventually, a
distribution-independent configuration framework) will, along with a
stronger LSB, help unify further the various Linux distributions.

As a result of our Anaconda work, we have ceased work on four projects:
PGI, autoinstall, gnome-tasksel, and python-parted.
Anaconda+PickAx provides essentially the same functionality as PGI, and
the functionality of autoinstall, gnome-tasksel, and python-parted are
now provided directly by Anaconda. If anyone
in the Debian community is interested in taking on any of these
projects, please drop me a note. I know that one group is actively
moving to adopt PGI, and has already created an Alioth project.

Anyway, I hope this clarifies our current direction wrt to our
Debian-related projects as well as provides a "new beginning" for
Progeny's relationship with the Debian community. More details
will be forthcoming in the next few weeks. Please feel free to contact
me if there is anything more we can do.

-Ian

-- 
Ian Murdock
317-578-8882 (office)
http://www.progeny.com/
http://ianmurdock.com/

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