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Re: Libranet to sooth the savage Debian beast???



So there seems to be a lot of confusion on this thread about how various
architectures influence the debian installer. Let me try to clear some
of the incorrect statements up..

- "discover only available for i386"

  Actually discover is built for all our architectures.

  Hardware detection is generally not as much of a problem on other
  architectures though, that do not have the plethora of crap hardware
  that has to be dealt with on i386. An imac is an imac is an imac. Sun
  has only put out so much sparc hardware, etc. The kernel does rather a
  better job of detecting hardware on other architectures than we i386
  folk are used to.

- "woody doesn't use discover because we have to support the lowest
  common denominator"

  The debian X setup program in woody has been able to use discover,
  read-edid, and mdetect in combination for a long time. This trio can
  pretty well autodetect your video card, monitor and mouse, on new-ish
  i386 hardware. The reason you have probably not seen this in action is
  due to a bug in the woody installer, that does not *install* the trio
  of packages before setting up X. This is due to insufficient testing.
  It's probably fixed in unstable, but has again not received enough
  testing for me to really know if it works right.

  The new debian-installer project uses all the hardware detection it
  can, on any given architecture. One of its design goals is to allow
  for noninteractive, fully autodetected installs. Supporting the lowest
  common denominator (ie, boot floppies and ISA bus machines :-P) is not
  really holding debian-installer back, instead it contributed to it
  having a very flexible, modular design.

- "debian is hard to install because of politics"

  There is really no political cabinet who have decided that debian
  needs to be hard to install and that if it doesn't work on a s390
  console install we won't do it. Really there's not.
  
  What there is is a group of people who are mostly working on whatever
  area of the system they feel needs work. Most of these people have
  installed debian 3 or fewer times in the past year, and it worked ok 2
  out of 3 times; the third install had some minor problem that they
  hacked around fairly easily. So most of these people do not work on
  first-time debian installation at all, and instead concentrate on
  improving the upgrading process that they have done hundreds of times
  in the past year.
  
  Then there is a small group of people who have day jobs which involve
  installing or selling debian, or who have installed debian more than
  ten times in a given day. These people are very interested in making
  the installation better, so they work on that. Some of them create
  debian-derived distributions for specific targets, and not all of
  their work ends up rolled back into debian. Some few are able to use
  debian directly and make larger contributions to the installer. There
  are very few of these folk, and they're still being pulled in all
  different directions, seeing different requirements, being interested
  in installing debian on different hardware, and so on. This doesn't
  make for fast progress in any given direction.

  Folk move between these various categories all the time. This doesn't
  smell of politics to me.

-- 
see shy jo

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