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
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