On Sat, Aug 21, 1999 at 04:59:52AM -0400, Justin Wells wrote:
> Here are the points about Debian's install that need to be fixed:
> * Ask all the questions up front. Don't make the user sit in front
> of the machine watching emacs byte compile stuff between questions
Or at the end. You might like to take a look at the debian-admintool
archives - at least one of the proposals on there is being implmented.
> * Make better re-use of answers to questions. Don't make the user
> say five times what their email address is, packages should
> notice that a question has already been answered in response to
> some other package's needs, and not bother asking again
If any packages don't reuse information then file bug reports - policy
already says that configuration should be shared where possible. Note
that contact e-mail addresses probably don't fall into this category -
the webmaster may not care if mail is going wrong, and may have nothing
to do with kernel building.
> * Ask fewer questions. During the install, half the time Debian has
> the right answer already as a default--in most of these cases it
> would be just fine to go ahead and not ask. For example, how many
> people REALLY care whether "gv" or "ghostview" is used to read
> postscript files by default?
Again, see debian-admintool. One of the suggestions is for priority
levels for questions.
> * Hide some more moving parts. I don't really need to see the
> intermediate results of Debian scanning my CD to find the
> only archive that's there.
OTOH, one of the things many people like about Debian is the way it
doesn't try to hide moving parts. It's often nice to know that
something is happening, and sometimes provides useful information when
trying to figure out problems. Then again, for some reason it seems
to scare some people.
> Most of these are just UI cleaning issues and window dressing. I think,
> though, that they would make a lot of people a lot happier about the
> installation process. Remember that this is the first exposure most
> people have to Debian--it will be weeks before they begin to see the
> value of a package manager that can do sensible upgrades (ie: because
> it will be weeks before they need to do that). In the meantime they
> will be grumbling about the "ugly" install.
Then they should immediately upgrade to unstable :-) :-) .
The install was actually one of the things that really impressed me
about Debian when I first tried it. With other distributions I've used
I always had to run about trying to remember what I'd installed and what
needed to be configured after installation. With Debian, the system was
usably configured as soon as the install had completed - everything else
was fine tuning. I wasn't running DNS or diald on the box, but IIRC
they're the only things that actually required any post-install
configuration.
Of course, I'm not trying to mass install things, and I happened to
avoid getting any really noticable waits between package configurations.
> If they are annoyed by a few other things, they may quit Debian before
> they realize it's value.
> One or two of these points might raise some deeper technical issues.
> For example--is there a good way for the package manager to extract
> a list of all the questions it needs answers to in advance?
debian-admintool. It's all vaporware at the minute, but that's probably
the best time to bring up any suggestions.
On Sat, Aug 21, 1999 at 04:00:14AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Julian Taylor wrote:
One common convention in e-mail and on Usenet is to reply after the
relevant text, removing as much quoted text as possible without loosing
context. Ideally, the reply and quoted material should be interspersed.
This makes it much easier to follow discussion and reduces bandwidth.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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