Hi guys,
We're going to be making a "preview release" of sarge sometime fairly
soon, probably by the end of the month. This will be a snapshot of
testing at some particular time, with CDs and net install images and so
forth. It'll be promoted to real live users, and we'll be soliciting,
collecting and collating real live feedback from them.
The thought of the comments you're probably going to get should probably
be somewhat scary at best.
The aim is to make the move from research and development and prototyping,
to getting d-i to be a real, supported, usable program now, rather than
later. Basically, if we're ever going to make a release with d-i, then we
need to stop worrying about underlying architecture, and start making what
we've got work. If we release with an utterly plain, boring, even ugly
text frontend, that's fine - releasing with something that won't install
Debian, or that crashes half the time you use it, or that is needlessly
confusing and obscure isn't. Of course, pretty and intuitive are good too.
Since Tollef Fog Heen seems to be busy, I've asked Martin Sjogren and
Petter Reinholdtsen to make up a list of the major things that need doing
to d-i to make it more usable. Presumably top of the list is getting
the netinst image down to size again [0], but I suspect I don't have
much chance of getting "Get d-i lead developers to change their names
to things I can spell" on there. Oh well.
Basically, please keep doing what you've been doing, but try to keep
an eye on things that a user will find annoying, and fix it sooner,
rather than leaving it 'til later.
Cheers,
aj
[0] Although you might like to just declare the netinst image something
that you have to use PXELinux to boot -- and thus the size doesn't
matter much. Having internationalised CD images and netinst images
that are limited to 2.88MB, and an uninternationalised floppy image
that's limited to 1.44MB could be workable.
--
Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
Debian Release Manager
Attachment:
pgp45y8DfjPr7.pgp
Description: PGP signature