[gentoo-installer] Why not GLIS?

[Scott Hadfield]

I know it's a bit late for this discussion, but I never really 
understood why GLIS wasn't a viable installer project for gentoo. It 
even seems to me that an initial goal of GLI is to get to the point 
where GLIS is at right now, i.e. working, based on a configuration file, 
and highly flexible. GLIS is written in bash and made up of about 8 
small bash scripts (except for the partition code, which is way too big 
for bash), and in my opinion this is really all you need for a gentoo 
installer since all it takes to install gentoo is a few bash commands. 
GLIS simply takes those commands and puts them into scripts.

I don't think GLIS is the do-all/end-all of installer projects, but I do 
think it's a good project and that it does the job quite well. I've even 
written a small gentoo kickstart howto with glis (needs updating) that's 
posted on the forums.

I've followed this installer project from its beginning in January, but 
it seems like most of core developer's don't have as much spare time to 
devote to the project as they may have initially thought. If you adopted 
GLIS as gentoo's installer right now then at least gentoo would have 
something, and in 6-12 months when GLI is done you could switch over it. 
The one large development benefit I see from this is that people can 
immediately start working on a GUI for the installer, and as long as the 
GUI's interaction with the backend is well enough seperated from its UI, 
there would be little difficulty in porting the code to work with GLI.

Of course having two different installer's at the same time would mean 
more to manage, but the number of bugs that get reported on GLIS have 
been very minimal in the past few months and I could easily maintain it 
myself.

Cheers!
Scott

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