[Haskell] ANN: Debian From Scratch 0.99.0

[John Goerzen]

Here's why I'm sending a copy of this announcement to the Haskell list:
The tool that generates these ISO images (dfsbuild) is written in
Haskell (having been ported from OCaml).  The generated ISO images also
contain full, working GHC and Hugs environments.

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Debian From Scratch (DFS) is a single, full rescue CD capable of
working with all major filesystems, LVM, software RAID, and even
compiling a new kernel.  The DFS ISO images also contain a small
Debian mirror subset that lets you use cdebootstrap, along with the
other utilities on the CD, to perform a manual, "Gentoo-like"
installation.  It also serves as an excellent rescue CD, with a full
compliment of filesystem tools, backup/restore software, and a
development environment complete enough to build your own kernels.

DFS also refers to dfsbuild, the tool that generates DFS images.
dfsbuild is available as a Debian package.  dfsbuild is designed to
make it trivial to build your own custom DFS images.  You can have
your own set of Debian packages on your images, your own kernels,
etc.  Unlike many other systems, you can go from the example dfs.cfg
to a customized DFS build in just a few minutes, even if you've never
used dfsbuild before.

Today I am announcing the availability of DFS 0.99.0 images for
i386/amd64 and dfsbuild 0.99.0.

dfsbuild is available in sid and (hopefully shortly) testing.  My DFS
ISOs are available from http://people.debian.org/~jgoerzen/dfs/

DFS is not a separate distribution.  DFS images *are* Debian.  What
you get when you boot a DFS CD is etch (or whatever you built your own
images with), with a few minor tweaks to make it run from CD-ROM.

These are the major changes since the previous incarnation of DFS:

 * Entire program rewritten from scratch.  Ported from OCaml to
   Haskell, with some Busybox scripts.

 * DFS now supports Debian initramfs kernels out of the box.  It
   continues to support kernels with enough drivers statically
   compiled to load the CD.

 * Switched from apt-move to reprepro for the generation of the
   on-CD mini Debian mirror, saving space on the generated image.

 * DFS images now use (and require) udev.  2.4.x kernels are no longer
   supported.

 * CD-ROM autodetection via /sys.

 * My DFS images are now built with testing (etch).

 * My DFS images now come with multiple versions of GCC, plus development 
   environments for C, Java, Perl, Haskell, Pyton, OCaml, shell, and
   tcl.

 * My DFS images now come with various version-control programs: CVS,
   darcs, bzr, subversion, git, cogito, arch2darcs, tailor, etc.

 * Numerous additions of other packages to the DFS images; full list
   at [1].  My DFS images now contain 575 packages.

 * My DFS images now built with etch, and come with enough .debs to
   cdebootstrap sarge, etch, or sid (assuming sid is stable enough at
   this time)

 * My DFS images continue to be able to cdebootstrap either an i386
   or amd64 system.

A more comprehensive list of DFS features is available at [2].

[1] http://people.debian.org/~jgoerzen/dfs/pkglist-0.99.0_i386.txt
[2] http://people.debian.org/~jgoerzen/dfs/html/intro.html#FEATURES