Re: debian installer test report

[Patrik Hagglund <patrik.hagglund@bredband.net>]

> > General comment: I don't like menus (besides the fact that they
> > are too large to fit on my screen). Why not provide the user with
> > a shell prompt and a written user guide instead? Think of an
> > operating system (or a sequence of more powerful systems)
> > speficically tailored to bootstrap (the installation of) Debian
> > (from a floppy/CD). When you consider time is due, you can create
> > a GUI wizard that automate things as much as possible (perhaps
> > specific for i386 to keep it simple) as an alternative user
> > interface.
> >    
>
> Thank you. After working on debian-installer for about a year (others
> have worked on it longer than that), this is precicely what I wanted to
> hear. "Hey, why don't you scrap all that stuff you've been doing and do
> <radically different thing> instead?" Come on. Do you really think that
> a majority of our userbase (and prospective userbase) prefers a shell
> prompt over a menu?
>  
Well, excuse me for being frank.

My answer to your question is: Both yes and no.

I think that the main problem with menus is that you easily get
completely lost when something goes wrong, and I got the
impression that debian-installer is in a state where things can go
wrong (both because of errors in the debian-installer code and
user errors). Yes, there is a shell prompt, but you don't know how
to use it unless you know how debian-installer works under the
hood.

Excuse me for being frank again, but I had been more impressed if
I had been able to say: "Oh, it works. You only need to create a
user interface." But maybe that's just me, and maybe a user
interface is more interconnected with the underlying mechanisms
than I think.
--
Patrik Hägglund