On Saturday 30 December 2006 00:28, peter green wrote: > imho there are only two classes of people who are likely to be using > the manual entry option: those with enough knowlage of urls to > understand a request for a mirror url with an example and those being > told to do it explicitly by a local expert (e.g. thier network > administrator) who should just be able to give them a url that they can > type without understanding it just as they do for websites already. Sure, but both are minorities, and implementing this still leaves the vast majority out in the cold. > for both of theese situations i'd think a single url would be less > hassle than four seperate questions some of which are hidden in > non-expert mode despite the need for them on some networks. The only option that is hidden is http/ftp selection. > though maybe if going with the url option it would be nice to make it > auto-prepend a default protocol (like web browsers do) and try adding > /debian to the end if it fails to find a valid debian mirror at the url > given (this would mean that someone could still enter just > ftp.uk.debian.org and it would still work). Still, displaying a full URL would be very confusing for most users... I can maybe see us parsing a full url _if_ it is entered in the existing field for hostname (probably only plus protocol as directory question will be asked anyway). However, implementing this within the existing structure will be quite challenging. What you are trying to solve here can be very easily solved by using preseeding or passing options on the boot prompt, so I still don't really see it as a serious issue. I don't plan to spend any more time on this before the release of Etch, sorry.
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