Re: graphic installation to debian
Christian Perrier wrote:
Quoting Attilio Fiandrotti (fiandro@tiscalinet.it):
hi
the description of the main question of the disk partitioning tool comes
to my mind: it's so long that it needs a textarea to allow word wrap,
whilke a matching extended description is not provided at all. (i
inserted a woraround for this in the gtk but this of course is not optimal)
I'm not really sure what you're talking about, actually..:-)
Anyway, for sure, the partman main screen is a huge hack to present a
kind of menu to suers and we all know it's suboptimal...
ok..
Normal questions descriptions should be "short", while extended
description can be as long as we want since they are displayed in a
sctollable textview widget.
Not as long as we want. They have to fit on a 80x25 screen, along with
the short description, with the dialog interface. This is mandatory.
i'm alright with this: i was just meaning the gtk frontend has (almost)
no limits on the lenght of a question extended description.
Many questions like the one that lets you choose what type of md (0/1/5)
array has to be created lack an extended descrtiption: since creating md
arrays is a not-so-easy operation we could offer to the user more
informations about what a md is, what's the difference between raid
0/1/5 etc..
I don't really agree here. Explaining what is a MD and the differences
between RAID flavours pertain to the documentation. Even more, they
pertain to the user's "cultural" background. Anyone installing a RAID
system without knowing what is RAID deserves the horrible problems
(s)he will have, imho.
For sure md is an "advanced" feature of the d-i but, even if the user
knows the difference between mode 0/1/5, he could be unaware that /boot
cannot stay on a md device and keep on wondering why grub cannot be
installed on the mbr even if the base system got correctly installed.
This is exactly what happened to me: after many tries i was starting to
think that my netfinity scsi controller was damaged and i had to install
a md fedora to get warned that /boot cannot stay on a md type 0 device.
You can tell me i should have documented myself better before trying to
install a md 0 system, but this applies also to the case of the average
user.
Those are just two examples: try to perform a complete
debian-installation (including lvm, md, network and grub advanced
tweaking) with the gtk frontend and you'll find many questions that are
not descripted as well as they could.
If the gtk frontend is someday going to become the default frontend for
the installer those annoying "bugs" are to be corrected for sure.
While I agree that we must try to take advantage of the graphical
frontend , it should in no case be the dimensioning part : the dialog
interface will remain and will probably still be the default interface
for installs. So nothing should be specific to the graphical
interface.
I agree wih the idea that the d-i shoud be projected with no particular
frontend in mind: infact i plan to remove as soon as it's possible many
hacks introduced in the gtk frontend as workarounds for problems
originated by writing (extended) question descriptions specifically for
the newt interface (like wordwrapping descriptions for multiple select
questions or the mchanism that displays the description of a question
instead of the extended description if the last one is not available)
What should be possible is adding some "extra" text which could be
displayed under a "help" button in the graphical interface (or maybe
the text interface if we find a way to do so). I'm pretty sure that
Joey has some ideas about this..:-)
like a "very_extended_question_description" field?
But, in no case should this text be mandatory, ie the installer should
remain usable without it.
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