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