Re: Which idiot made Calamares used in Debian ?
Hi!
For context (and to answer the question in the topic), I'm the Calamares
maintainer in Debian and the Debian Live team member who added it to our
live media...
On 2019/08/29 05:17, Sam Hartman wrote:
>>>>>> "michael" == michael caron couturier <spikemcc@gmail.com> writes:
>
> michael> The app is unaccessible for blind users fix your mess
> michael> before adding crap ... -- Michaël C. Couturier
It is true that Calamares is inaccessible for blind users at the moment.
But as mentioned in another post, the usual debian-installer is still
available from the boot menu exactly as it was in stretch and
debian-installer will probably continue to be available on live media
for as long as it exists in debian. (unfortunately that boot menu isn't
very accessible for many either, but I digress...). A few things
exacerbated accessibility for buster which included sound driver issues
and a move to wayland that makes it really difficult for apps to look at
other apps, but I'm not going to spend too much time on that topic here
either.
> It's true that there's not an supported accessible installer that you
> can run once you've booted a live system. In some ways this is a
> regression over stretch. Although the installer you could run from a
> live system previously had a lot of bugs.
Not true, stretch didn't have any installer available from the live
session, there is no regression from stretch here.
> We were aware of the accessibility issues with Calamares and would love
> to see them improve in the future.
FWIW, after reading Mo Zhou's post[1] about tensorflow to to
debian-devel on Sunday (I need tensorflow in order to package Mozilla
deepspeech, which I want to use, among other things, for installer
purposes), I realised I need to look into alternatives and have spent
around 13 hours this week so far reading about speech to text in Linux
and learning about natural language processing (which I apparently still
need to do a lot of). My goal is to use this in an installer that might
help for a lot of accessibility use cases (people who can't see, who
have limb mobility problems or tremors etc) but who still can speak and
hear to install Debian by talking to the installer. For example, you'd
say something like "Reduce my windows partition by 20% and use the free
space to install debian" or "Reduce my Windows partition to 400G and
create a 20G partition for linux and 80 for home", then the installer
should try to figure out what the user wants and repeat back what it
intends to do and confirm that it's acceptable. I can understand how
something like that may seem too ambitious for an idiot like me, and I
realise that it might even take a few years to eventually get there, but
I'm chugging along and making some slow but good progress in figuring it
out.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/08/msg00450.html
> I also hope that over time Calamares accessibility improves.
Calamares is working on it and have made good strides on getting the UI
to run as a non-root user during the 3.2 series (they didn't hit all the
goals listed in https://calamares.io/calamares-3.2-plan/ yet but they'll
get there). I think an installer UI that doesn't run as root is a good
thing for everyone.
> Debian is best when we all work to improve it.
Calamares, at this point, is an improvement for Debian. It makes the
system installable from the live session and overall it makes the system
easier to install for (at my thumbsuck who works with a lot of different
kind of users) about 90% (or perhaps even a bit more) of the typical
laptop/desktop users out there. It also makes things like
full-disk-encryption that is becoming increasingly important out there
really easy, that's still way too complicated for an average user in
debian-installer.
Calamares added initial support for RAID devices during the buster
freeze (so we'll have it in bullseye) which boosts it by another
percentage point or so for the segment I mentioned above. Adding some
sort of preseed support and Debian-specific options that we're missing
will boost it a little more. I don't think Calamares will ever make it
to a 100% installer because of overall design issues which might even
get fixed longer term (for example it's hard dependency on Qt libraries
atm), but it does help for some very real problems out there.
So, I'm not denying that Calamares has limitations, and that the
accessibility issues are a problem, but including it for Buster has only
brought positives without taking anything away from anyone compared to
the situation we have in stretch, so I don't regret the progress that
we've made at all.
I could talk a lot about installers at this point but I'll leave that
for another time.
-Jonathan
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.
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