On Monday 26 January 2004 16:33, Eric Sammer wrote:
> While I believe that being able to pause between steps and drop to a
> shell is a useful feature (especially for those learning), I don't think
> it's absolutely required. 

I think it's useful beyond learning. You can never provide for _all_ 
situations in the installer frontend. In fact, I agree with my reading of 
your document: that the installer should somehow allow for _all_ situations, 
even those we don't foresee. So I think we should at least let the user skip 
any step, pause and access a shell at any point.

My idea in fact was to provide as much freedom as possible - tell the user 
what we think he should do but never force him, even with things like step 
ordering and doing a step twice. The user shouldn't have to know what to do 
next, but if he does know better than the installer he should be able to 
override its suggestions.

With such a design you could still provide interfaces for whatever you wanted, 
and the average user wouldn't ever know about it, but in exotic setups the 
installer would still be mostly useable; it wouldn't be an all-or-nothing 
thing.

> Someone (klieber, maybe) suggested a console view to display what hte
> installer was actually doing which might not be a bad idea. The Mac OS X
>   installer has a "view log" menu item that displays just about
> everything it's doing down to detected disks and the like. I think
> something like this might be good. The console install can do the same
> by supplying an option to switch to a log view. It's all pretty open ended.

To me this is a must-have feature. When something goes wrong, this display is 
necessary for a meaningful bugreport - think "emerge glibc dies 1h27m after 
starting" errors. We also need to be able to display the output of config 
commands in case of errors. Finally, this can be a temporary measure until we 
have proper emerge progress bars.

-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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