[Soc-coordination] Improve Debian-Installer network setup - Report 1

[Sorina - Gabriela Sandu]

Hello!

I'm Sorina and this summer I will be working on Debian Installer
network setup during Google Summer of Code. I am a second year
bachelor's student at Politehnica University of Bucharest, I am
studying Computer Science.

I am at the beginning of the project, I believe now I am accustomed to
the way things work and I am waiting forward to finishing the exam
period so that I could really start working.

The hardest part for me in what I've done so far is testing what I am
doing. It took me a while to figure out at least a part of how the
installer functions and to solve the problems that occurred while
building. Luckily, there is documentation and internet and even more
important, I had help and support from my mentors.

So far I have only written two patches for netcfg, which can be found
in the repo [0], for bugs #610752 [1] and #636211 [2]. For the first
one I had a version for a while now, but I was unable to test it
(unfortunately, it's likely that you will hear this a lot in the
future). The idea was to make the link detection timeout preseedable
and for this I have added two new templates, asking the user to
provide a value for that matter.

The second one involved a missing "Go Back" button. This seemed to be
the result of not letting debconf know that the program is capable of
handling the user pressing a back button. That could be solved using
deb_capb.

As I said before, testing was my main problem. Eventually, I built the
image, wrote it to an USB and rebooted my laptop. This served its
purpose, since I had access to anything I needed such as the wireless
interface and physical access to the network cable. Running it through
a virtual machine did not help much in this case, because I was unable
to provide those.

Another thing I considered to be hard was blog posting, but after
writing my first post it seems that I overreacted.

That's all for now, have a nice day!
Sorina

[0] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=d-i/netcfg.git;a=summary
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=610752
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=636211