Gentoo Archives: gentoo-desktop-research

From: Dan Armak <danarmak@g.o>
To: gentoo-desktop-research@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-desktop-research] Gentoo installer project
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 17:52:53
Message-Id: 200401261948.55393.danarmak@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-desktop-research] Gentoo installer project by Eric Sammer
1 On Monday 26 January 2004 16:33, Eric Sammer wrote:
2 > While I believe that being able to pause between steps and drop to a
3 > shell is a useful feature (especially for those learning), I don't think
4 > it's absolutely required.
5
6 I think it's useful beyond learning. You can never provide for _all_
7 situations in the installer frontend. In fact, I agree with my reading of
8 your document: that the installer should somehow allow for _all_ situations,
9 even those we don't foresee. So I think we should at least let the user skip
10 any step, pause and access a shell at any point.
11
12 My idea in fact was to provide as much freedom as possible - tell the user
13 what we think he should do but never force him, even with things like step
14 ordering and doing a step twice. The user shouldn't have to know what to do
15 next, but if he does know better than the installer he should be able to
16 override its suggestions.
17
18 With such a design you could still provide interfaces for whatever you wanted,
19 and the average user wouldn't ever know about it, but in exotic setups the
20 installer would still be mostly useable; it wouldn't be an all-or-nothing
21 thing.
22
23 > Someone (klieber, maybe) suggested a console view to display what hte
24 > installer was actually doing which might not be a bad idea. The Mac OS X
25 > installer has a "view log" menu item that displays just about
26 > everything it's doing down to detected disks and the like. I think
27 > something like this might be good. The console install can do the same
28 > by supplying an option to switch to a log view. It's all pretty open ended.
29
30 To me this is a must-have feature. When something goes wrong, this display is
31 necessary for a meaningful bugreport - think "emerge glibc dies 1h27m after
32 starting" errors. We also need to be able to display the output of config
33 commands in case of errors. Finally, this can be a temporary measure until we
34 have proper emerge progress bars.
35
36 --
37 Dan Armak
38 Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
39 Matan, Israel
40 Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
41 Fingerprint: DD70 DBF9 E3D4 6CB9 2FDD 0069 508D 9143 8D5F 8951