Re: Some reflections on the future of partman [was: Partman]
Anton Zinoviev wrote:
Hi!
In general Partman suffers from two things.
First - it is very slow. I'd say it was designed to be slow because
when I started thinking about it I didn't expect that it will become as
slow as it is now. Moreover adding additional components to it make it
even slower...
Second - its interface is based entirely on debconf. This means that
its interface is linear, no button bars, no mouse, no keyboard
shortcuts, no menu bars, etc.
That, I think, goes far to make it as hard to use as it is. My primary
concern, even on my P II test machine, is not speed, its ease of use.
It would be easier to users, I think, to be able to specify all
decisions about a partition on a single form, so they can see all the
info that is required and see at a glance what they've said.
Also, any other paritions already specified should also be visible.
I've not tried LVM or RAID, but I have a feeling I could make parallel
comments there.
In order to solve the first problem we have two choices:
1. Wait until the computers became faster. At 2009 when sarge+1 will be
released [;-)] they will be about 5 times faster than now.
2. Rewrite it in some other language. If we take this approach I would
suggest to package some scripting language (perl, python, guile) as udeb
as making big changes in C programs is a pain. If I wrote partman in C
there would be no big difference between its first version and its
current version.
I don't recall now whether Red Hat's previous installer was written in C
or Perl: whichever, one of the Anaconda developers swore he'd never
write another installer in <that language>.
I'm not familiar with guile, Python I'm starting on. ESR has some
interesting comments on Python V Perl at
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882
In order to solve the second problem we have these choices:
1. Add to cdebconf additional types of questions. This would make the
interface considerably better, but not as nice as the interface of the
other installers.
2. Do not use debconf, but write directly to the screen. I'd not love
this approach.
3. See how this problem is solved by SuSE - YaST supports both text and
graphical installs, both have very nice look and as far as I know there
is almost no duplicate code (due to text+graphics). Notice that
recently (and finally) SuSE released YaST as free software (GPL).
You should always survey the opposition. Anaconda, Red Hat's GPL
installer, is written in Python. It does both text-mode and graphical
installs.
Also, Anaconda's already been ported to Debian.
I have no problem with you looking at YaST2 - only with you ignoring
Anaconda<.> For that matter I believe Mandrake has some nice tools too,
though I'm not famiiar with them.
--
Cheers
John
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