Re: woody : X install
On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 05:21:00PM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-10-21 at 13:54, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > I'll be rewriting it from scratch over the coming months and trying to
> > work out a strategy for letting the user select between up to three
> > sources of information:
> >
> > 1) what the autodetection tools (if any) say
> > 2) what the debconf database already says (if anything)
> > 3) what the X server config file already says (if anything)
>
> Speaking with my Debian Desktop hat on, I would prefer it if you took
> the approach of just trying what the autodetection tools said, and only
> if that fails, offer the user a choice of options. If the autodetection
> tools give incorrect information, then that's a bug in those tools we
> should fix. If the X server doesn't get enough information from the
> autodetection tools, then we should fix that.
The hand-waving rendition of the debconf-style approach would seem to be to
run autodetection and seed the database with the results where it is
successful, and choose appropriate priorities for the questions, so that:
- if the autodetection works very well, most users don't need to see the
question.
- if the autodetection fails, the user gets some useful choices
- anyone can choose manual configuration, with hints from the autodetection
routines
I don't think that we can expect anything near perfect accuracy from
hardware autodetection, so the default fallback should be manual
configuration, not "fix the autodetection" (though that is better where
possible).
> Here is a very very good article about free software and user
> interfaces:
> http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html
This is good stuff.
--
- mdz
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