Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sat 25th Oct 2003 05:13 UTC, submitted by Charles Krohn
Today, Ian Murdock described his recent work on APT to the Debian community. This announcement has far-ranging implications for the future of Fedora and Debian projects. Ars Technica has the details.
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"Dispite the great work, I wonder how long it'll take debian to get off it's lazy butt to use dpkg-anaconda..."
The answer is: forever. Anaconda will almost certainly *never* be the official Debian installer. One of the things Debian prides itself on is consistency throughout all its ports, or at least insofar as this is possible. Thus, to be eligible, a given installer would have to have been ported to work on all 11 supported Linux architectures and also be able to support the non-Linux ports, e.g. Debian HURD and Debian *BSD. Perhaps Progeny have extended Anaconda sufficiently for it to be able to handle all of this (there isn't enough detail to know for sure), but I somehow doubt it.
In any case, a new Debian installer that's intended to be capable of servicing the entire distribution in this way has been in the works for some time and is now reaching maturity. Progress reports and testing images can be downloaded from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/getting_started , or alternatively just install Skolelinux (http://developer.skolelinux.no/) which is using the new installer.
Of course, if anyone wants to make *unofficial* install images using Anaconda, nothing's stopping them. This would actually be pretty useful as a stopgap measure until the next Debian release comes out, but that's about it.
As far as Progeny's stated goal of "a distribution-independent Anaconda [to] help unify further the various Linux distributions" (http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200310/msg01...) goes... I'm not quite sure how the porting of Anaconda to a distro that's infinitesimally unlikely to ever adopt it is supposed to be a great first step towards achieving this ambitious aim, but there we are.
"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."
These enhancements sound marvellous, but I'll save my praise until these things turn into actual achievements rather than just aims for the future.