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I wonder why regular distros even need installers. I mean yes, it's friendly to new users. Yes, some steps must be run that cannot be expressed as one-size-fit
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
I wonder why regular distros even need installers.
I mean yes, it's friendly to new users. Yes, some steps must be run that cannot be expressed as one-size-fits-all files in a tarball.
But could a power user not untar a filesystem and run a script and be good to go? I know that's a de-facto installer - I just wish the tarball was easier to get at, I guess. Seems like a lot of data (deb packages) tied up inside code (one big 'install' function)
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoIt depends how you want the "install" to go; Gentoo stage3 tarballs are exactly like that (and, unsurprisingly, the BSDs at least used to favor it). On the other hand, I'm personally quite fond of the method where you point the package manager at a root directory and it creates the system there by (more or less) just downloading and unpacking packages into that directory; off the top of my head, nixos defaults to this approach, Arch at least used to, yum/dnf distros were quite happy to do it with a little prodding, debian does it with debootstrap... Anyways. The point is that this is in some ways more flexible; rather than starting with a root tarball and then adding packages, you just... install packages (almost incidentally including core/base packages).
- metalspoon 3y agoThat's almost how you install Arch, btw.
- antod 3y agoYup, all doable. 15yrs ago, I'd build custom Xen PV images for Debian and Ubuntu VMs that would start off as running debootstrap into a chroot. It was basically just that a directory you'd customise files in and turn into a tarball.