[woody] My plans.
Joey sent me a note yesterday with some of his ideas about how the
next generation installation system ought to work, and saying that he
thinks we need to plan well prior to writing any code.
That probably landing in my mailbox during the time I was busy
putting together the `gnewt' repository, etc.
I think he's right... we do need to plan before we code. I don't
know how much reorganization we really need to do, though...
It would be a major improvement to take `boot-floppies' as they are
now, and do nothing more than rewrite the user interface, to make it
less serial. It can use more of the capabilities of `newt', such as
grids and trees. Perhaps the disk partition editor from Red Hat's
libfdisk can be plugged in also.
At this point, I have *not* read the sources to `slang' and `newt'
yet. The `newt' documentation is very lacking; there are a lot of
undocumented features, and thus the source is the documentation right
now. I imagine I will learn quite a lot from it. School starts
tuesday, and tomorrow I go buy books. When there's time between
school days and homework, I will try and read `newt', and to learn to
write a few simple interfaces with it. I'll look over other `newt'
programs. (what are some good ones to look at? I've never used Red
Hat; I imagine they use it quite a lot; what should I download from
them for code examples?)
Everyone should start a file of their own, and jot down their ideas
and outline what they see as how the installer ought to work. Later
we'll make a spot for those in CVS, and that way we can all compare
notes, discuss and debate, then begin a shared planning document.
--
A few months in the laboratory often saves several hours at the library.
mailto:karlheg@debian.org (Karl M. Hegbloom)
irc: nick karlheg on irc.debian.org
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