On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 03:56:21PM +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > * Anthony Towns > | On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 08:54:29AM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > | > Because I'd like to Debian be installable with much fewer questions, > | Do you realise what that means? It means: I want everyone to end up with > | the same system. > Actually not. [...] > This will be possible in d-i, by choosing that you only want to see > questions with high or critical priority. However everyone that does this will end up with the same system. > If you want nitty-gritty control, choose low. The issue's a little subtler than that. Effectively, you're giving people a choice between "here, have this sytem that's okayish, but almost certainly not what you actually want, then make it look the way you want by hand later" or "go through all these annoying options most of which you don't care about". Whereas ideally, what you want is a way of easily including non-free, or setting up a wiki server, or otherwise indicating that you want some common variant of a Debian system without an undue amount of effort. Compare the high/low question with, say, letting people answer "Standard install? Yes/No" and then get either everything in standard installed and a root prompt, or being prompted whether or not to install every single package one by one. There are *much* better interfaces for that task: aptitude, dselect and tasksel. I think that's worth extrapolating. > And if that's not enough, customizing a floppy > set with even more predefined answers shouldn't be that hard. That's possible, and it's what Knoppix and PGI and so forth are effectively doing. It doesn't really benefit the people who grab a Debian CD, or poke through the Debian website, and want to install Debian, 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. ``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
Attachment:
pgpWAIsK7aDWo.pgp
Description: PGP signature