Re: [gentoo-installer] Major GLI Redesign!

[Andrew Nishihira]

Than-you very much for the up-to-date progress. Congratulations for all the
hard work done up to now.I look forwards your release. Anything good to make
Gentoo installation easier for more people.

On 10/17/06, Preston Cody <codeman@g.o> wrote:
>
> Greetings and salutations,
> In GLI's 2.5 years or so of existence, we have achieved almost all of
> the goals of the project.  The first main goal of GLI was to make a
> fully automated installation program that would work off of profiles,
> be non-interactive, and architecture-generic.  The other main goal was
> to make an installer that could be used by end users for their
> desktops without having to know XML and with pretty, easy-to-use
> frontends that would help boost the reputation of Gentoo as not just a
> super-l33t distro.
>
> We have struggled and faught hard to achieve both goals at the same
> time, but alas they are simply too different to be able to handle both
> and do a *good job* at both.
> The main problem, as was to be expected, is partitioning.  Andrew
> Gaffney has spent ages working on trying to support every insaine and
> idiotic combination of partitions that users try to create, but there
> are millions of combinations and the simple truth is we can't do it
> right for everyone, and we're tired of the endless stream of people
> complaining why their drive with 6 primaries isn't being supported.
> Also, with the current partitioning, it is extremely hard to support
> raid or lvm or other architectures in general for that matter.
>
> After seeing the simplicity and ease of Quickstart, the solution
> became clear: admit failure and split/branch GLI.  So here's the plan:
>
> Quickstart will become the primary method for automated installations.
> It is designed to be able to be netbooted and will be the installer
> integrated into Scire.  It may also be added to the minimal livecd at
> some point (why not, right?).  Quickstart works with blank drives
> only, and is not too user-friendly.  Currently no frontend or
> configurator exists though I have plans for a web-based one that will
> plug in to Scire nicely.
>
> GLI will be refactored to become slightly more interactive.  There
> will probably be about four main steps/stopping points/actions that
> will occur.
> 1. Setup networking, logfiles, chroot_dir and such.. i.e. all the
> client_configuration stuff.  This already is done interactively from
> the two main frontends.  We can thus chuck the entire client_profile
> (yea!!!!)
> 2. Drop to cfdisk or diskdruid to let the user do partitioning and
> probably filesystem formatting too.  This lets the user deal with
> partitioning themselves and thus we don't get the blame when they
> screw it up! :)
> 3. Define mountpoints.. these will replace the partition layout in the
> install profile.  Then we fetch/install the stage tarball and/or
> portage.  We will still keep the dynamic stage3 (as well as making
> command-line tools for its use), because the installer-livecd isn't
> changing.  Having this step separate lets us choose profiles and
> gather updated info about things like USE flags.
> 4. Everything else.  There really isn't much benefit to separate out
> the rest of the steps.  We'll let people drop to a shell to make their
> own kernel config, but I don't see much beyond that and I still like
> the ability to configure at once and then let it go for a while.
>
> These changes will drastically simplify the partitioning code and make
> GLI much easier to port to other architectures.
>
> The plan is to release a version of GLI like it is now with bugfixes
> only for 2007.0 and target the new GLI (god forbid, should we call it
> GLI 2.0?  <cringe>) for 2007.1.  If enough progress has been made, we
> can try to put an experimental copy on the livecd and hide it (doesn't
> make much sence to have an entirely different /experimental livecd
> just for that).  The new GLI will be written first and foremost with
> gli-dialog as the frontend.  The GTK frontend is quite bloated and a
> pain to change and maintain, so it may disappear entirely and that is
> ok by the installer devs.
>
> That's about it, if you have any questions/comments, feel free to post
> them.  This list has like no traffic so it could use some discussion
> every once and awhile.
> Have a pleasant day,
>
> -Codeman
> -Installer Project Co-Lead.
> --
> gentoo-installer@g.o mailing list
>
>


-- 
Andrew