Re: debian installation
On Sat, 21 Aug 1999, Justin Wells wrote:
> I think that Debian has a much better technology, but the average Debian
> user right now gets to stare at all the whirling gears in the install,
> and sometimes tinker with them, to get things going. The average RedHat
> user watches a status bar crawl across their screen. Or yet another
> metaphor: Debian has built a solid structure, but not yet done all
> the drywalling, or hung the front door in its frame.
Perhaps the average Debian user WANTS to see what's going on and perhaps
tinker with it. I know I do. I grew up with computers where I could see
EXACTLY what they were doing, and most of my time was spent at the
so-called "Command Line Interface". As Windows and other graphical
systems became more and more popular, I found that they did some nice
things and allowed applications that needed to display lots of graphics a
better way to do so, but I started longing for the feedback given by the
programs written in a command-line era, very quickly.
So with that in mind, some comments on your comments... (:
No flames.
I learned a lot during my first Debian installs by watching what was going
on and being required to be awake, alert, and involved in the process of
installation via questions asked by the installation scripts. I can't say
I completely ENJOYED the experience, but it was useful. Learning is
difficult stuff... but well worth it!
Remember the packages in Debian are coming from various upstream sources,
and the "questions" those packages need to have answered are not known in
advance. Adding some kind of "default Q&A manager" or somesuch to
Debian would mean a lot more work for the package maintainers, since
they'd have to not only modify or create installation scripts and make
sure the packages get built correctly, but also figure out how to use this
new automatic answer software that would have "all the answers" to their
package's questions, and how to handle when that program didn't have all
the answers. Lots of extra work.
Many other Linux distributions don't require installation scripts be
created/added for their package systems at all, or worse you still have
to go run some silly configuration utility for each package by hand after
supposedly installing the package through the package manager.
This is not just a Debian issue, IMHO.
Finally, if it takes someone weeks to see the value of a package manager,
they probably don't understand what package management is and they need to
go learn how badly some other distros handle it. (:
[Snipped large technical discussion section...]
As far as your ideas about package managers and how they work goes, as
always in the GNU/FSF/OpenSource/Linux world... crack open the code and
try to add some of what you mentioned. It's ALWAYS an option! (:
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