Re: Planned packages for sarge
* Hamish Moffatt
| On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 09:50:23PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
| > * J?r?me Marant
| >
| > | So, would you mind telling us a bit more about d-i?
| >
| > sure. :)
|
| Here's a higher-level question.. what are the goals, and how
| is it better than boot-floppies?
Please start out with reading the stuff in the doc/ directory. I am
not a native speaker, but I'll do an «executive summary» for those who
are somewhat interested:
d-i is going to be a modular, multi-stage installer. It shall support
i18n and all our architectures. it should not ask questions multiple
times, so questions like language asked in the first-stage installer
should be reflected in the second-stage installer.
it is based around debconf, specifically the cdebconf implementation
of it, which should make it possible for different UIs to be used. So
far slang and text frontends are mostly complete, but work on even a
CORBA frontend has been started.
We are trying to push everything which is possible to push from stage
1 to stage 2 (stuff like timezone, for instance). We are using
regular packages (though they are called udebs, they are just normal
debs which are allowed to break normal policy and not provide stuff
like documentation).
The modular part means that we can just replace the partitioner
without changing anything else in the system and everything should
just continue working. So, well-defined interfaces. It also means
that we can load modules run-time, which allows us to use a single
floppy for booting. Hopefully. :)
it should be a lot easier to maintain, because of the modularity, and
it should be less special-case code than boot-floppies. In addition,
it uses debconf, which provides a good and consistent UI.
I find that those are the main strengths of d-i, though I have
probably forgotten some. :)
| On Sunday night I did a woody install from scratch on a new machine; 6
| floppies plus the network connection. Two things struck me:
| firstly, how perfectly it worked, and secondly how the overall flow of
| the installation, and parts of the installer UI, have not changed since
| my first install of 1.1 back in 1996/97. I think that's quite an
| achievement in itself - the old UI from 1997 is still good.
in http://url.raw.no/?28 I wrote:
: Yes. The installer should be sexy. It should cause people to go
: about saying ooh, aaah, not puke. It should be elegant, like apt is
: elegant and sexy. Obviously, it should work well as well.
:
: (No, I am not kidding. I am dead serious.)
I don't think the current UI makes people go ooh, aah. I think it
should. I am going to try making d-i into an installer which people
go around saying nice things about. :)
--
Tollef Fog Heen ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' :
`. `'
`-
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