Date: Sun, 31 Aug 1997 23:16:28 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: sysinstall (was Re: Conclusion to "NT vs. Unix" debate) Message-ID: <7098.873094588@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 31 Aug 1997 20:03:32 CDT." <Pine.BSF.3.96.970831193929.307L-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>
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Perhaps I'm just biased from my previous installation experience, but the way I see this working is as a series of linked "black boxes", each black box representing some functional block of installation hackery with an API for getting/setting its internal state and executing it. You allow boxes to be named, to depend on other boxes and to be arbitrarily chained together themselves. A "novice install" then becomes a simple matter of creating a chain of operations and starting the user off at the head of it. You'd have some sort of "escape mode" which allowed the user to jump up a level and examine this operation chain, moving forwards or backwards and perhaps able to distinguish completed from uncompleted actions by their appearance. Sysinstall also currently requires that each functional block roll its own GUI more or less from scratch - that's painful. It'd be a lot nicer if you could simply say that each block had some attributes and when you "visited" one, more generic attribute editing code could take over the job of presenting the appropriate dialogs. You have some known attributes for designating whether a block can be undone or has gone past the point of no return, etc. and so forth. Doncha think? Jordan
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