On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 10:38:41PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > I still think choice is good, and also what users expect of debian. A sane > default, plus the ability to override that in expert mode. Choice is overrated, and a poor substitute for properly working tools. "Which initramfs generator do I need to use so that my system will be bootable post-install?" is not a choice that *any* user looks forward to making; if a user really has a strong preference for yaird vs. initramfs-tools, that option is open to them after the install. Too often, Debian developers (and Open Source folks in general) give users "choices" in lieu of making sound technical decisions or fixing bugs. I'll take "install this; it works, and when it doesn't, the bugs will get fixed" any day over "well, you can have mediocre.py, or you can have mediocre.pl; if one doesn't work, use the other one". In the case of initramfs generators in the installer, giving users "choice" instead of just fixing bugs means pushing the load on the installer team for testing a greater number of code paths, and on the translators for debconf templates that no one should ever need. It's ok if both of the available alternatives are currently buggy and we don't yet know which one represents the correct technical decision; or if the correct decision varies from architecture to architecture. None of these are reasons to not make the decision -- we just can't make it /yet/. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that regardless of which initramfs generator d-i favors, the dependencies on the linux-image packages should be switched around to put initramfs-tools first so that we have an automatic upgrade path for sarge systems using 2.4 kernels. (Obviously, d-i can install whichever is better from an installer POV instead.) -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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