On Tuesday 03 February 2004 21:09, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:

> The backend doesn't actually do anything until all options have been
> chosen.  ALL installation activity waits until AFTER the user would
> click "finish" (just an example).  Nothing should be done until the user
> has made all choices.  Once the user has made all choices, it will pass
> the xml file to the backend and perform the whole installation.  This is
> really the desireable operation.

Why? Many people would want to be able to do parts of the installation 
manually while doing others automatically. As some parts cannot be performed 
out of order this means that if we want to support such a hands-on mode for 
the installer, we need to allow partial scripts to be executed. 

Basically what I want to say is that controlling the processing time etc. 
should be the business of the frontend. One could add a "verification" stage 
in the backend which would mean that the backend would first verify the whole 
file for correctness. This would basically function as a buffer for the 
execution engine.

Paul

ps. Further I am not convinced why in all cases execution needs to be 
performed only after the user clicked finish. 

pps. Note that I don't want to say that execution must happen immediately. I 
want to say that if we don't design it into the backend from the start, we 
probably would end up with a kludge that would need to be fixed later 
(incurring possibly a full redesign) 

ppps. designing in just includes thinking how it fits into the architecture 
and keeping a place (where it can be added later), it does not mean that 
everything needs to be in place allready.

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net