On 2017-07-05 at 12:44, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 12:11:27PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote: > >> I suspect that what the people who ask for this are thinking of is >> a step in the installer sequence at which you are prompted to >> choose which init system you want to be installed, such that the >> installer will never even attempt to install any other init >> system. > > Yes, yes, we know. But they're not going to GET this, so we are > giving them alternative ways to accomplish their goals. And that's fair enough, but it's very different from what Don pointed to in saying that this "already exists". > I use fvwm, but you don't hear me asking for the debian-installer > team to add a user interface option to let me install fvwm. This is > because I'm in a *small minority* of users, and it's not worth their > time to build a user interface option that only a small minority of > users are going to care about, especially when I can achieve the same > goal by running a simple apt-get command after the install. One difference there is that there *is* an option to install Debian with *no* WM, DE, or similar, and only install whichever one you choose later on. Since it is not even conceptually possible to install Debian with no init system at all (even if an option to do so existed, what would it *do* in practice?), having there be an option to select which of the available init systems should be installed - rather than having to let the system install one, then clean it up later on if that one is not the one you wanted - can seem like the solution least biased in favor of any particular init system. (Imagine if you didn't have the option to install just the "base" system, with no graphical interface, and had to install with a pre-chosen default - GNOME,or KDE, or IceWM, or whatever you care to name - and then remove that later in order to get fvwm in place. Sure, you could still *do* it, but wouldn't it seem just as reasonable to ask for an install-time option? Particularly if there were only a tiny handful of WMs, etc., available, rather than the proliferation which actually exist.) > Likewise, people who prefer sysvinit are a small minority, and they > can achieve their goal by running a simple apt-get command after the > install. There is no need to rewrite a complex user interface to > accomodate this. I think I disagree with one of the underlying principles of this viewpoint, but I can't quite identify what that principle is at the moment, and I kind of want to get to bed right now. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature