Thank you and good bye.

[Russ Allbery]

Henning Sprang <henning at sprang.de> writes:

> Maybe FAI packages in Ubuntu should be removed totally as long as we
> don't have a team of people really commited and with enough time to
> take care FAI is really working in Ubuntu.

FAI works fine for building hardy systems -- we use it.  What broke with
Intrepid and Jaunty is not FAI itself but its dependencies.  There
really isn't anything the FAI team can do to fix that so far as I know,
although I suppose they could dive into initramfs-tools and
live-initramfs and the like and try to upload changed versions of those.
But it would be way better to get that fixed in those packages.

I'm surprised that there isn't more activity around fixing the problems
with initramfs-tools and live-initramfs, since usually the maintainers
of both are reasonably responsive, but it may be that it's because all
the discussion has happened on the Ubuntu side and most of the
maintenance happens in Debian.

I think what may be missing here is getting the maintainers involved and
really understanding what changed and what broke and whether it's
something that's going to happen in Debian eventually or if it's somehow
Ubuntu-specific.  It may be that data is already there and I just don't
understand it, though.

> One last question: did you think about running FAI from a Debian
> server?  Installaing Ubuntu (and Debian, Redhat-based, and others)
> from there should be no problem and the support for FAI in Debian is
> usually quite good.

Debian-based FAI cannot build Ubuntu intrepid or jaunty systems; the
boot from the NFS root fails.  That's due to the initramfs-tools and
live-initramfs problems.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>