Bug#283540: installation report
From: Christian Perrier [mailto:bubulle@debian.org]
>
> Such a question would be pertinent enough is asked very eary...and
> thus would be in English only. As we always tried to minimize the
> amount of English seen by users (except those who choose
> English...obviously) as well as the number of screens seen by users,
> the configuration of the debconf priority has been left out of high
> priority installs.
I disagree with that... since the language question is
the first question, and it's critical (that's what the !!
means in the dialog titlebar, right?), the debconf
question could go right after it, localized.
The current second question is country -- is that used
to build the locale (ie: is my local en-CA because I
answered english to the first question and Canada to
the second)? If so, then IMO the country question should
be critical, and the debconf question should be after it.
IIRC, the country question is currently high priority.
BTW, I found the priority icons (!!, !, ?) in the installer
titlebars quite useful. Regular debconf doesn't seem to
have that. Is that an installer-only feature, or will it
be rolled into a future version of debconf?
> > One issue; I was asked if the PCMCIA driver should be enabled three
> > times (I'm pretty sure it was the same question) during the install.
> > Each time I said no, as my machine has no PCMCIA slot.
>
> There are situations where PCMCIA has to be enabled at a very specific
> step, hence the question. This is indeed the same module which asks
> the question.
Isn't debconf supposed to remember my answer the first
time? If you want to give users the option to say no
at first, and yes later on, there should be a third
button, "Ask again later". At the very least, the
question text should mention that it will repeat.
Seeing the same question repeated multiple times made me
think my install was busted at first, and I rebooted and
started from scratch.
Oh, I remember something else I found a bit confusing --
this was a new PC I was installing on, and the clock was
quite wrong. The UTC question asked me something like "Is
the system clock set to UTC?" The first time around, I
answered no, because the system clock wasn't set to anything
useful at all. Of course, I should have answered yes, and
then fixed the clock. A debconf question to let the user
set the clock might be useful here, or failing that, just
reword it to something like, "Would you like to treat the
system clock as UTC or Local Time?"
- Marc
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