Installation - More user friendly

[dashevil at sympatico.ca]

> 
> From: Johnson David <DavidJohnson at Siemens.com>
> Date: 2004/03/08 Mon PM 03:42:01 EST
> To: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk>
> CC: freebsd-advocacy at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Installation - More user friendly
> 
> On Monday 08 March 2004 12:15 pm, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> 
> > Now this I think will be a very productive way forward.  It's much
> > easier to write a program to do one particular thing well, and
> > integrate it into a collection of similar programs, than it is to
> > throw away everything and rewrite the whole lot from scratch. 
> > Problem is, sysinstall isn't really set up for piecemeal replacement,
> > and while sysinstall may have been the canonical 'throwaway hack
> > pressed into production' actually throwing it away means there has to
> > be a complete full-featured replacement ready to slot in instead.
> 
> While sysinstall itself isn't suitable for piecemeal replacement, the 
> idea behind it is. Consider the Slackware installer. It essentially is 
> a series of shell scripts throwing up dialog screens. (well it does 
> assume that you've already partitioned the harddrive, but that's 
> another story).
> 
> sysinstall tries to do too much. You can split up its functionality into 
> separate utilities and not lose a thing. Of course you would need to 
> get all of these utilities completed before you could replace it. But 
> these utilities would be useful in and of themselves in the meantime.
> 
> David

I agree with you very strongly here. I also think each tool should be built as a library core, UI independant (like gaim). That way we could make GUI tools that manipulate just about every aspect of the system without having to rewrite too much code.

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