Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2004 11:20:01 -0800 From: Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Cc: Donald Turnbull <dmturnbull@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Installation - More user friendly Message-ID: <200403081120.01163.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> In-Reply-To: <20040307205710.35302.qmail@web41207.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20040307205710.35302.qmail@web41207.mail.yahoo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sunday 07 March 2004 12:57 pm, Donald Turnbull wrote: > Plans exist aplenty. Talk is cheap. See, for instance the libh > project stuff -- http://www.freebsd.org/projects/libh.html -- which > was a nice idea in many ways but has entirely failed to produce any > results for about the last two years. What is missing are concrete > pieces of code: applications that work. If you think you can do > better than what we have presently, you are very welcome to submit > samples of works in progress. I think libh died because of me. I joined the list, and my "let me introduce myself" post was the last message ever on their mailing list. Maybe it's my deodorant :-( Seriously, I think the problem with libh was that it tried to do too much. I was to be a new package manager, sysinstall and GUI toolkit all wrapped up into one library. There was just too much stuff to get working correctly in the foundation before anyone could start working on the actually functionality. And the fact that you had to keep around old incompatible ports like qt2-static didn't help. What needs to be done is to go back to the UNIX way of doing things, and divide up the problem into a set of small tools each doing one thing very well. Then "sysinstall" would merely be a shell script combining the parts into a whole. I'm actually starting on one small piece of this. Contact me off list if you're interested. > On the other hand, your contention that FreeBSD installation is > user-unfriendly particularly for the nieve user, is not entirely born > out in practice. Most people take a few minutes to get used to the > way it works, and then find that they can navigate around the menus > and get things done very effectively. While that is true, there is still the problem that sysinstall is very hard to maintain. It was created over a weekend just to get something out the door, IIRC, and was never meant to be a long term solution. Just peruse its source code and see how long it takes until your brain starts hurting... > You'll also have a great deal of difficulty persuading experienced > users that they need a glitzy X based installer which won't work over > a serial line connection, and that doesn't permit the same > flexibility as the current sysinstall(8). Style palls very quickly > unless it is backed up by substance, but substance makes up for any > amount of lack of style. I think we need both text and graphical interfaces to sysinstall or its replacements. We need the text UI for all of the reasons everyone gives whenever the topic comes up. But a graphical interface is more than just eyecandy if done right. A GUI can display information/controls more efficiently than a text interface, and can provide a better "help" interface as well. As one example, consider partitioning the harddrive. For a fresh drive that's going to use several slices and partitions, one doesn't want to use "raw" fdisk, disklabel and newfs, it's just too difficult and error prone. Sysinstall is a much better solution, but still not ideal. An interface where the partitions are displayed and manipulated as graphs (such as with PartitionMagic) would be very convenient. You certainly don't need it if you go into the install process knowing exactly what your partitions are going to be, but if you don't a GUI can save you some time. As another example, to select packages in sysinstall, one enters a new screen for each category, and must back out to enter another. Two tree lists, one listing the available packages, and the other listing the chosen packages, would be very convenient. With the resolution of a GUI, you can have both of these lists on screen simultaneously. Debian does this with its text based tool, but it's extremely difficult to use. David
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200403081120.01163.DavidJohnson>