Sven Mueller wrote:
Installations with debian packages are far too verbose already for my taste. Please don't bother the admin (me) with questions at uninstall time as well. I hate giving an (un)install command, only to come back a few hours later to see that it waits for my input approx. 10% through the process. Actually, with (network) installs, this is even worse: When installing the system (sarge, with current debian-installer in expert mode), you often get the situation where you answer a (few) question(s), wait for more questions to come up but only see it downloading more software, so you leave the host alone to for a while (a few hours possibly), only to come back, seeing it waiting for you to answer another few questions, you do that again only see it doing more downloads, ..... The debian installation improved quite a bit over the last two years, but it is still faaaaar away from where I would like to see it: - Boot CD/DVD - Answer a few questions (e.g. partioning, boot loader type, packages selection, language, keyboard type, network setup, mirror selection) - Wait for all packages to be downloaded and unpacked (*) - Answer all the questions those packages might want answers to - Have a running system * This is the most important point: We can't avoid a wait here, since we need time to partition the disk, download/unpack packages etc., but there shouldn't be multiple prolonged waiting periods during an installation.
I'm actually only reading this list to get useful tips, because I might want to become a DD in the future. However, I have an idea for this, and I would really like it to be included in the installation. Whenever a package asks a question, the package should be added to a list of "needs answering". While waiting for the answer, the installation should continue with other packages (which don't pre-depend on any package which needs answers). That way, after waiting some time (possibly hours), most of the work has been done, and you can just answer the questions which are queuing up. After that, only a few packages (those that needed answers and the ones pre-depending on them) need to be installed. If this would be implemented, it would also be possible to skip some questions until later, and answer some others, so you can wait until someone who understands the question in some cases, without holding up the rest of the installation. I hope you didn't mind me doing other things than asking questions here. But this is something which annoyed me for quite some time, and if it could be improved I would be quite happy. Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://129.125.47.90/e-mail.html
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