Ole Streicher <olebole@debian.org> writes: > Hi Philip, > > On 06.12.2016 20:43, Philip Hands wrote: >> Could we serve their needs with an extra debian-installer/blend >> preseed to deal with this, probably aliased as just 'blend' so that >> one could type something like: >> >> <TAB>blend=med<RETURN> >> >> when booting the default media to get the desired result? > > I think this is really unergonomic, since people need to understand or > remember installer boot time options. Boot prompt options are magic for > many users, and they need to read the documentation to get this. > > And it is not recoverable: imagine that someone forgets to put it there > or made a typo, he cannot go back and change this -- he has to go > through the full installation process again. > > And it does not really *present* the blends to the user; he already > needs to know what is there. > >> If we then made the ISOs easy to tweak, so that the default option >> on the Debian-Med ISOs included blend=med on the command line by >> default, would that actually be better than what we have, and also >> allow us to drop the problematic tasksel items? > > Since I already answered this, I hope it is OK to just copy my old > argument here: > > I am not convinced that it is a good solution: First, it multiplies the > whole image creation process by the number of blends. That's not what I had in mind -- if we make the images trivially tunable, then one only actually needs to generate one image. The offering of specialised images could also be optimised by doing the edit on the fly in the webserver. It would certainly be a waste space on dumb mirror servers though. > But it also gives a wrong sign: Debian Pure Blends are by definition > integral part of Debian itself. But even now, this is hard to understand > for many people -- questions like "what is the difference between Debian > Astro and Debian" are quite common, even in front of a poster describing > exactly that. With having separate official images for all blends, > people would even be more confused. As an example, I would take the > Ubuntu approach of having "Ubuntu", "Kubuntu", "Xubuntu" etc. instead of > installation options -- people usually think that they have to > re-install the system if they want to switch from one flavour to the > other. Having similar experience with Debian would be bad for the > reputation of the Blends, and for Debian in general. That's a very good point. Fair enough. Perhaps we need an aditional option at the boot prompt for a vanilla install, that sets priority=critical or some such, so that one gets the equivalent of hitting return thoughout the installer, and only get prompted for the user & passwords, the point at which you're going to trash your disk, and not much else. That would deal with the case of people that might be upset by too much choice, and then having more choice of blends would be less of an issue. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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