Re: Installer help text
The cdebconf is more than simply an "installation tool", as is a
framework that allows a generic client application (like netcfg, hd
partitioner..) to interact with the user using a simple protocol based
on "question asking" (you could use the cdebconf to do completly
different things than installing the Debian too :).
When the client app commands cdebconf to ask the user a specific
question, cdebconf is able to choose the best way to interact with the
user by using the most appropriate frontend available for the machine
it's running on (textual only frontend, semi-graphical like NEWT,
graphical like GTK).
As every question has to be displayable by many different frontends,
special fields or tags cannot be easily added for GTK frontend, tought
the plugin mechanish gives possibilities to extend the primitive types
of questions.
Every question is provided by two fields that contain detailed
informations for the user, and those fields are "description" and
"extended desciption".
This should be enough to explain any kind of detailed information to the
user to support him even in the most critical installation steps.
One bad thing is that some important questions (i don't remember what,
right now) like the ones asked by partman still lack of an extended
description still today.
Is suppose this is a reminiscence of the times of the NEWT-only
cdebconf, when to display a question's extended description you had to
press a "Help" button in a not so user friendly way.
Now that the GTK frontend can display the question's description
togheter with the question's exteded description, all those questions
could be provided with an extended description too.
This could improve user friendlyness at almost no cost, as no
modifications to the cdebconf would be needed.
So, i support John's request to use *more* text as the GTK frontend
gives this possibilty but we're not taking advantage of this right now.
friendly
Attilio
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