Installation - More user friendly

[Johnson David]

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