Sorry.

[Paul Robinson]

Terry Lambert wrote:

> I also think that this is 100% incompatible with installs onto
> headless boxes with serial consoles, and that you can't really
> reconcile the two approaches in the same distribution without
> multiple installation disc's.  This means regular CD's and not
> a DVD, or it means a seperate distribution from the WC CDROM
> one.

That's funny. Sun are able to do headless installs over an entire server
room, AND have a graphical installer when you're sat in front of the
box, and they don't need to have separate distribution CDs. It must be
magic! :-)
 
> This is also not reconcilable with minimal installs, which do
> not have the ability to run a big graphical app.

Yup. Several months ago, my interest in installers piqued. I am now
obsessed with them, because it also requires an understanding of upgrade
processes, patching, the whole shebang. It's one of the few things the
BSDs don't actually do particularly well - it works, but not
brilliantly. Those who seek "a graphical installer" miss the point by
miles. I now have hundreds of notes on this that I'm going to assemble
into some sort of mini-paper and then a high-level functional design for
the "perfect" installer. Then a roadmap for development, and then
hopefully some devs who have more current experience of the scary coding
required will get an interest. I know I've been saying this for months
now, but really, you can expect to see something on that soon.

I actually really like some aspects of the DragonFly plan. It has lots
of faults, but it has that kind of weird Unixy feel by using existing
tools combined in an interesting way. They plan to write the installer
code in ultra-easy-to-change PHP4, serve it via Apache for remote
network installs, and on the local console you just use links -g with
your graphics guys just needing to edit HTML and GIFs. You then have an
easily customisable, brandable installation system. It doesn't address
the package management issues they want to, and I can see security
problems from miles away, but it's innovative. It's certainly not
something I've seen discussed elsewhere.

Anyway, this is about to bikeshed. We can all see it. So let's stop now
for a little bit. I promise within a month a mailing list away from here
where you can rip this to shreds and bikeshed as much as you want. :-)

--
Paul Robinson