This just came up in irc -- non-gentoo LiveCDs can follow the handbook verbatim except for some minor points, which should be changed if possible to allow any installation environment. One of these are the mirrorselect calls, which take place just before the chroot. If they were after the chroot, users on any installation medium could follow the handbook directly. Problems: - mirrorselect would need to be merged by the user - (or added to the stage3). Reproducible: Always
I'd rather not have people install mirrorselect after chroot and running it then. The "official" way of handling installations is through Gentoo installation media. Trying to support all other kinds of installation media, how popular they can be, would lead us too far imo.
I don't think that explicitly supporting all install media is a good idea, but making it easy is certainly a good aim. "You can install from any environment" may not be an official position, but it is believed by a large amount of the community, and is regularly said to newcomers. Since this is the _only_ command in the handbook which isn't available on the grand majority of other live-media, it makes sense to me to make a minor change to the instruction-ordering, and to enable the use of other media without caveats in the text. This wouldn't be the same as officially supporting them, it would just help out real (new) users who have been told that it should be possible already.
the handbooks are written for our installation media. for other approaches that require doing things differently on unsupported installation methods, we have altinstall.xml. users shouldn't have to specifically emerge mirrorselect during the install process, since it's a one-time deal, and the tool is already bundled with our CDs. users of other distros can just follow the manual selection method.
