Date: 23 Apr 2002 01:24:20 -0700 From: Ken McGlothlen <mcglk@artlogix.com> To: Mark Filipak <filipak@earthlink.net> Cc: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>, freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Mark asks: How should I partition/slice for appliance? Message-ID: <874ri2akln.fsf@ralf.artlogix.com> In-Reply-To: <3CC50569.618066AD@earthlink.net> References: <Pine.GSO.4.44.0204221350530.17335-100000@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk> <3CC4D69D.86A86352@earthlink.net> <87lmbfc8ps.fsf@ralf.artlogix.com> <3CC50569.618066AD@earthlink.net>
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Mark Filipak <filipak@earthlink.net> writes: | The installer is an inadequate tool. It needs to be improved and the | improvements would not take very much effort if there was a will to do it. The installer is adequate. No more than that, I'll grant. Nobody would argue with the fact that it could use some improvement. Do you have the time to do so? Can you fund an improvement project? This is, regrettably, part of the problem with free software: it doesn't have as strong of an emphasis on marketability. | > The installer is fine. | | It's not. It's silly. It loads packages one application at a time, putting | up a status box and pausing momentarily for each file instead of just doing | the install. It could run twice as fast as it does. It could also | scoreboard what is to be installed and simply check to see if there is | sufficient disk space. How am I know that? You toss everything back at the | person (newbie) doing the install. Why don't you just admit that the install | application is lame? It's utilitarian. It works. It's not as friendly as you'd like. It's not Windows. But it works. It's a tool that gets the job done. It does require that the person using it have more awareness than other more friendly operating system installation programs. But it's what we can afford to have at the moment. You are familiar with budgetary constraints, yes? The FreeBSD team has a budgetary problem that comes down to time, and that's pretty heavily prioritized. Sorry, but there it is. | It certainly seems to me that the human installer is holding the robot | installer's hand. In this case, you're quite correct. | I don't think the installer has any impact on the size of the installed | system. No, but the components being installed sure does. | You know that's not what I'm saying. Is this the bsd gospel I'm getting. | It's an os, and an installer for goodness sake. I will stick with what I | wrote: First impressions mean a lot and the first impression bsd gives is | one of incompetance. That's not a fair statement; if you believe it, though, you're probably better off not using it. | Please let this thread die, Ken. You are not going to change your religion | and I'm not going to try to get you to change it. I'm not looking at this as a religious debate, Mark. I'm simply saying that your characterizations aren't very reasonable, and it's not particularly useful using the language you've been using to complain about the installation process when the project as a whole (and the support thereof) is provided on a volunteer basis. It does make it hard to enthusiastically provide support. If you need a friendlier system to feel comfortable, then FreeBSD can't accomodate you at this time. If you still want to use FreeBSD, then you may have to just swallow the shortcomings. If you want to *improve* the installation process (either by contributing your coding expertise, time and/or money), more power to you! Lots of people would be grateful, I'm sure. The installation process is limited. I've said it before. It does push more of the responsibility for success onto the user. J'admitte. I agree with all that. But I don't think "incompetence" or "stupid" is a fair assessment, and I'll take the time to argue that one. I'd let you get away with "dumb" (as in "dumb terminal"), but not without wincing. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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