Hi,
I've started to work in order to allow debian provisioning with
cobbler. I send attached two patches.
The first on is actually not strictly related to debian, and it's a
reorganization of the archs management,
to simplify it and ease smooth addition of other distros: debian calls
amd64 to x86_64, and the idea is
to keep the RedHat names as canonical ones.
The second one does actually allow to import the content of a debian
CD/DVD and create the corresponding
distro. It also creates the profile breeded as debian, although it
might not be usable yet.
There are a couple of open questions that might affect other parts of
cobbler or where just ideas are required.
- the kickstarts for debian. They are called "preseed", and are by far
much more complex than a standard
kickstart. Although not strictly required, it might be better to
have new names for both ks files and directories,
but I think that they can be easyly added to PXE boot options. To
make things worst, ubuntu does allow both
the standard debian preseed and kickstart files.
- the package repositories. Debian follows a quite different approach,
and a single tree can hold many versions
and different architectures. Allowing a cobbler distro to have
multiple architectures might reduce the disk usage
and simplify the repository updating. Due to this fact, a single
debian media can install multiple archs, complexing
a little bit to import the media.
These are the only two points I see on the close horizon, but there
are probably more. It anyone has concerns
or ideas, they are welcome. And if anyone can actually test the
deployment (when it matures a little bit), much better.
Javier Palacios