Re: Installation = Velvet Rope
On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 09:54:45AM -0500, Narins, Josh wrote:
> Installation is the Velvet Rope, keeping out the hopelessly clueless.
I'll bite.
The installer itself is not that bad, that is, that thing that guides
you in the partioning and similar stuff. Dselect is quite ok, sure, if
you are in a hurry, tasksel is a nice thing to have. What's utterly
broken is the series of incoherent questions that start poping up when
you actually start with the package installation. Sometime ago I did
a fresh woody installation with fresh woody CDs. That was the first
time I saw the _current_ installer[0]. Wow! Much better than the last
time I saw it! Well, until all the debconf stuff started popping up.
I did this install in the way any new user would: I just pressed enter
at the prompts I didn't care about, e.g., the one about the kind of
questions that I wanted to see. After that, I got a couple dozen of
questions asked, most of which didn't actually have anything to do with
the rest of them. Think of it: you are asked something obscure about
your keyboard layout, and then something about the serial port
configuration, and the something about CVS repositories, and some stuff
about the configuration of the X server -- and AFAICS in the future
you'll be asked something about your TeX installation. I have seen
_all_ those questions in the past during regular unstable upgrades, but
this was the first time I saw them as a single lump. It was
frustrating at best. I kept asking myself "is this thing going to
stop? how about right now?"
I might have made the mistake of changing the level of questions I
wanted to see, but AFAIR I didn't.
Point is, that's the scary bit about the installation. The initial
part is quite ok, IMO. It *could* be easier, it could be smarter, it
could guess more, but that doesn't mean it's hopelessly unusable, as
some people seem to imply.
> P.S. If you were Microsoft, and you wanted to destroy Debian, what
> would you do to the user/developer base? Just asking.
Start a flamewar about stopping the development of a new installer?
[0] For whatever reason, my previous woody installs were actually
minimal potato installs which where later upgraded to woody over
the net. Probably because I didn't have a woody CD at hand.
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