Re: points on future installation disks development

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

Andy Mortimer:
> - rewrite dinstall in C:

First of all, I want to thank you for your work on "giggle", and on the
dialog emulation using "giggle". I think this is just the thing we need
for many configuration tasks on Debian.

I was thinking of using S-lang for the installation scripts. For the people
not familiar with S-lang, it's a small interpretive stack-oriented language
that manages to have C-like syntax and has its own cursor-handling library,
and you can easily export C functions to it. Size-reduction is even more
important than speed, and S-lang might let us have both. However, note that
we can currently export any amount of C code to "ash" using "busybox" (in the
boot-floppies package).

>       - todo: make a libsfdisk from sfdisk

There is an fdisk 3 that was designed to be machine-callable.
Its author seems to have let it sit for about a year.

>       - turbovision (licence OK?), or

I think the license is less than acceptable at the moment.

From: Sven Rudolph <sr1@os.inf.tu-dresden.de>
> direct cursor addressing and all the pseudo-graphics
> stuff can get confusing for blind people

If you do something for blind people, you can do two levels of support.
Nikhil Nair <nnair@debian.org> uses a blind person's screen reader,
which allows him to read and respond to character screens that use cursor
addressing. He has a small Braille "window" that he can roam over the screen.
I think he has highlights and text attributes in a separate "screen" from
text, accessable with an alt-button, but they may well be slower to use.
Then there is speech. It happens that some blind users have less-than-perfect
finger sensitivity and prefer speech. The one I knew was an electronics
enthusiast, and I think his soldering technique might have had something to
do with his impaired finger sensitivity. I have a circa-1986 serial DECTalk
to test speech output on.

	Thanks

	Bruce
-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP   Bruce@Pixar.com   510-215-3502
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