Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: > "A big blob of data" is a bit too much, I'll admit that. > > However, assume the user knows nothing about what the heck "eth0", "DHCP", > "hostname" or even "mirror" is; then I'd believe it's confusing. :-) > Of course, if we could change to "first network card", "automatically", > "computer name" and "download site" or whatever, it would probably be > slightly easier. (I'm not really sure if those are sane terms or not, but > you'd probably get the idea.) > > The question is, do we really need all of those? Even if the user har > specified "novice" first? What will it buy us over the current rather > "wizard-based" (if I can say that word without people throwing up ;-) ) > approach? Thanks, I completly understand where you're coming from now. I agree, at a minimum, it would need to use slightly longer and more descriptive phrases. What does it buy us over a straight-through approach? Well, tke the dhcp problem. Many users who would not consider themselves experts or who don't want to be bothered by all the extra low priority questions do have good reasons for not wanting to use DHCP even if it's available. I've seen literally dozens of people complain about this lack of control. But a true newbie doesn't want to see a "Use DHCP" prompt either. My idea caters to both to some extent. It also should result in a lot fewer questions than the current approach, for most users. This seems like a good thing. > Of course, I still think we shouldn't do too ugly hacks close to release. Of > course, nobody knows when release is supposed to be... Well, I was talking with aj last night, and he is definitly pushing for d-i to get in a releasable state ASAP. I think that beta 2 is a good step in that direction, but it's not quite releasable. This is making me lean toward limiting what gets into the next release more than I had hoped to, and that may include this change. At some point we'll just have to start documenting things like the DHCP problem instead of trying to improve them, but I hope we're not *quite* at that point yet. -- see shy jo
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