Forgive the subject change without reference to the old subject..
On Sat, Jul 25, 1998 at 01:11:50AM -0700, Grant Bowman wrote:
> Are what you are proposing possibly consisting of
Things several of us suggest would to some extent provide these...
> a) better installation with good defaults and possibly
For the installation up to the profile selection, we're not doing too bad.
> b) a seperate install that is "start and walk away" to allow real neophytes
> to begin painlessly on a single partition or something.
This is a design issue we can't begin to touch yet. However I can see a few
things that might automate some otherwise annoying things---mime types for
example? Have the mime types be given a value, say 20. When a mime type
matching is installed, it's assumed to have a priority 20. It will be used
before any others of priority 20. Now, if the update program keeps track of
a package name as well, it can be updated without interfering with the user
defined priority. The ones you want to use you set priority 21 or above.
Simple as that. See the update-modules program for an example of the kind
of thing I'm talking about. Edit a source file, run update and it creates
what it needs to. One less obnoxious place to find prompts and other
annoyances. Some user friendly thing could be made available for letting
the user edit their priorities, but I don't need/want one personally.
Another idea.. Does dpkg have a "leave unconfigured" switch? Something
that will unpack, run preinst and all, but NOT run postinst? Any program
that doesn't have pre-depends on it could wait until it was done for
postinst. So, install everything and then after all the waiting is done,
THEN ask the questions and provide warnings you need to. I don't expect
dselect methods to do this, but apt might. And apt can be used as a dselect
method, so you can still use it.
Another idea... Where's linuxconf anyway? Provide some defaults and then
ask "Do you wish to configure ${PACKAGE} now? If the user does, give them a
subscreen of linuxconf with the package in question's configuration options.
This is a more long-term thing.
I'd like to hear other ideas if people have them. I'm keeping a list of
these kind of things in case someone decides they are important enough to
try and implement.
> c) support to allow newbies help themselves somehow (lists, web
> conferencing, whatever) and not get in the way of developers
debian-user, #debian, www.debian.org, the Debian Documentation Project, ...
I'm leaving things out, but the idea is that these exist already---we just
need to make sure people know about them.
> d) more newbie instructions included with some utilities and
> e) Newbie manual?
I'd like to see some help on the rescue disks. I'm sure it doesn't fit very
easily, but. Maybe even just menuconfig-type help?
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