Always, always read documentation
After suffering very limited connectivity in Cape Cod via my Treo 600 tethered to my laptop, my early return yesterday was immediately met with my best attempt at catching up to the progress made by the rest of the Summer of Code projects. I began by putting what I’ve learned thusfar into code, specifically a udeb for debian-installer. Given the excellent documentation, that was easy: just make a standard debian package with a few extra lines in control, and drop it in the localudebs directory in d-i. This however neglects a fairly important part that somehow vanished from my memory and that my eyes continued to glance over in Frans Pop’s “Debian Installer Internals” presentation. I forgot to actually add a package list containing my udeb. Debian installer was not skipping over my package because it wasn’t passing some sort of check, nor was d-i broken. I did not figure this out until after I had torn apart my udeb, parts of the d-i build system, and built a Debian unstable VM with the latest d-i SVN. Whoops.