Re: Easier installer?
Thomas Lange, on ven. 17 nov. 2017 19:20:09 +0100, wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 01:17:47PM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > In Debian, using netinst, we have
> .
> .
> > and that's it.
> >
> > That's a bit more items, but not by so much.
> No, that's a lot more than other installers.
Please tell me what items are there that are not in other installers,
apart from the ones I mentioned as potentially to be moved to expert
mode, and the ones I believe we don't want to move to expert mode,
whatever other installers chosed to do.
> IMO our installer is not for beginners, it's for advanced users and
> for experts we have much more questions. d-i lacks a beginners mode
> with only the minimal questions.
Really, the current set is almost minimal.
> All questions were we normally just hit return can be omitted, if it's
> still possible to switch to a "show-me-more-questions"-mode.
Among the ones I mentioned,
- language/country/keyboard: we can't afford to omit them.
- hostname: other installers invent hostnames, but they still show it
and allow to modify it. That's really useful.
- domain name, as I said it could be moved to expert
- password, can't avoid it
- username, do we really want to avoid it?
- timezone, can't avoid it
- confirmation for using the whole disk, can't avoid it
- choosing the disk, can't avoid it
- partition layout. One could argue that it's just confirmation that
could be skipped. If we do skip it, I believe a lot of people will shout
- last confirmation, don't really want to avoid it.
- additional CD input, can't avoid it, or else we should just throw away
the whole sets of CD images as useless.
- mirror selection, as I said perhaps we could avoid it by using
deb.debian.org by default if it works nice enough. If it doesn't, then
that's were work should be done.
- http proxy: that's arguably something one can't avoid. Quite a few
networks really require it. This question could however be automatically
skipped if d-i notices that it is able to download over http without
problems. Again something to be fixed, not just blindly ignored.
- task selection: can't avoid it.
- bootloader installation: that has been discussed here several
times. The result of the discussion is that we just can not detect this
properly, so we can't avoid it.
So?
Put another way: I *don't* think we want to change this set of
questions, we'd just lose users. Thus the other proposal, proposed right
from the start of the thread: have *another* panel of questions really
meant for beginner, and that advanced users can easily skip, for the 90%
cases that often match beginners cases.
> > - bootloader installation (we really can not avoid this step, it poses
> > too many problems).
> Why can't we avoid this question? I wonder because other distributions
> do not ask it.
History has shown that we can't have a sane default for this.
> A CentOS 7 installation just asks me the language, which disk to use,
> a password for root a user name and password. Nothing more.
> But I still can have a different timezone or keyboard beside the good
> defaults they set.
It's just crazy to assume that knowing the language allows to know the
timezone and keyboard. For a huge portion of the world this will just
fail. And the corresponding users won't even know that they have to
change the timezone.
Don't try to change that balance it took us years to find just because
beginners want sometime else. The proposal mentioned earlier in the
thread looks good to me: really have a *separate* panel for beginners.
Samuel
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