Re: proposal for apt setup in first stage
Joey Hess wrote:
The point of moving apt setup into the first stage should be to make it
integrate better with d-i.
Call me stupid, but I always had problems choosing my favorite mirror
(local apt-proxy in my case) during installation. Maybe I am branded
with bad experiences from older days. Thus I always use the defaults
during netinst, choose nothing in tasksel, and after this I edit
sources.list manually.
Looking into the templates of choose-mirror I cannot say exactly, what
the problem is/was. One was, that I did not understand how the
selections or the manually entered mirror form the line in well known
sources.list syntax. I remember boring trial and error at this point.
Second were bad or slow mirrors.
Now I tried apt-setup - the current Sarge version.
1) 'edit sources list by hand'
This presents 'vi', which means, that a user has to know, how to turn on
edit mode and how to quit or save. As vi is not self-explaining, vi
should never be the default editor or the default user interface.
2) 'http' and <enter> the defaults
At the end there was no chance to see the generated result, nor to step
back or cancel.
My suggestions to support both - newbies and experts - better:
1) Some additional explaining words or examples, what content is
expected at 'enter your mirror'.
2) Present the result - the generated lines of sources.list - to the
user, before they are saved and applied.
3) Before applying give the user the chance to choose <cancel>, <back>
or <edit>.
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
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