Sam, On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 03:07:25PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote: > As part of our project, we've been examining the user experience of > the Debian install; we want to give incoming students a good first > impression of Debian so they'll continue to use it. We're using PGI > to build our installer, but many of the concerns raised are not > specific to PGI. It seems that many of the issues brought up in this exercise can be easily fixed by ensuring that debconf is not overly verbose by default. Do you know what Geoff selected as the minimum priority of debconf messages he wanted to see? I've heard the criticism before that many packages seem to ask all questions at priority high, and there seems to be some truth to this.[1] I imagine this is in part due to the fact that the target audience for Debian unstable who help us detect these bugs are ten times more likely as the target audience for Debian stable to want to twiddle their systems with debconf at 'medium' instead of 'high'. :) I haven't looked lately to see how close this is to reality, but I think at install-time, Debian should work something like this: * the initial debconf priority setting should be 'medium', so that debconf/priority gets asked. * debconf's "what priority do you want?" question is asked, *with the default option set to 'high'*. * the install proceeds, and by default only questions of priority high or higher will plague the user. Then the next step is to get people to help deflate the priorities of the debconf questions that are out there, either by running test installs at priority high or by combing their own templates.dat files looking for questions that would vex the neophyte. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer [1] Samba is unfortunately in the list of ill-behaved packages for woody, since the upload that fixed the debconf severities was two days too late for the freeze -- but I'm also much happier to have the debconf support we /do/ have, as opposed to the sambaconfig script that was used in potato.
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