On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 06:48:27PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> > If we do go with boot-floppies for woody, I'd be strongly inclined towards
> > downplaying debian-installer so as not to divide the testing effort and
> > leave us with a choice of two installation methods that both suck. To get
> > boot-floppies to work with woody at about the same quality as potato's
> > install, will likely take a couple of months; to get debian-installer
> > to work at a similar quality could take... four months? six?
> To get debian-installer to work at the same level will take at least one
> cycle of testing by a sizable fraction of our entire user base. There is
> no way we will catch every edge case without that. 5% would probably do;
> tucking it away in an obscure directory and relying on word-of-mouth
> that this option exists if you can find it will probably NOT do.
>
> I don't know what variety of downplaying you have in mind; my plan has
> been to have it available in the main archive (as it is) and probably on
> CD's, and have a single pointer to it in the installation manual, with
> hopefully a sizable buzz about it amoung those who use it succesfully,
> and no downplaying of it at all to the people who choose to develop it.
> Much more downplaying has the possibility of killing the project; not
> getting us enough feedback so it is not fully usable and viable when
> sid's release rolls around.
First, sid never releases: it's a completely permanent unstable.
One way of handling it would be more like:
woody/main/disks-* <--- recommended installation method, tested,
working etc
sid/main/debian-installer/* <--- new development thing hax0rs
might use
Once woody's tested, and fixed, and released, (and debian-installer is
usable on i386 for many cases, and somewhat ported or so, say), we switch
to:
sarge/main/debian-installer/* <--- recommended installation method
sid/main/debian-installer/* <--- development on above
and spend the entire six to eight months or more of the development cycle
building CDs of testing, and installing them with the debian-installer.
As far as losing the buzz goes, I'm quite sure that you'll only become
*more* interested in getting debian-installer to work after spending a few
months working on boot-floppies. :-/
But if it's not going to be working for woody, I'd rather it be considered
more like, say, apt was when hamm came out: something to look forward
to in the future, rather than something to try to use now.
MHO, only, though.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Thanks to all avid pokers out there''
-- linux.conf.au, 17-20 January 2001
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