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Debian turns tenDebian turns tenPosted Aug 16, 2003 16:36 UTC (Sat) by tjc (guest, #137)Parent article: Debian turns ten 3) Debian will contain a installation procedure that doesn't need to be babysat; [snip] Something went wrong along the way. I don't mind the boot floppies text-mode installer (I know some people do), but I find it very inconvenient having configuration questions all mixed in with installation. I've started installs and gone to lunch, then come back an hour later and find the installer waiting for me to answer some really obscure configuration question. Selecting the option that asks the fewest number of questions helps some, but it would be nice if the installer asked all the configuration questions up front before it starts chewing on the hard drive.
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Debian turns ten Posted Aug 16, 2003 21:49 UTC (Sat) by erich (subscriber, #7127) [Link] You can a) select the amount of questions you will be asked b) a lot of questions can be answered at the beginning of the installation (that is what the pre-configure scripts are for)But before you have downloaded the packages these questions are not known; so it's (mostly, there are some package where this doesn't work yet) downloading, configuring, installing.
Debian turns ten Posted Aug 16, 2003 22:16 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] But it doesn't need to be this way.All the dependancies are in the Pacakges file. Why not put the questions a) all the questions can be asked at the very beginning I guess the "what do you want to do about this config file that you
Debian turns ten Posted Aug 17, 2003 1:53 UTC (Sun) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] a) all the questions can be asked at the very beginningb) questions get to be well structured and not ad-hoc. c) answers to questions can be stored in a temp file so that if the installation aborts for some reason the user doesn't have to answer them all over again.
Debian turns ten Posted Aug 18, 2003 23:15 UTC (Mon) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link] I guess the "what do you want to do about this config file that you seem to have changed" question would have to be dealt with differently, but I suspect that could be delayed until afterwards. Well, as to that, I think an upcoming dpkg feature in the "this took way too long for someone to think of and implement" category will be 3-way merging of config changes. Not hard to do with diff and patch, maybe they'll even use the 'wiggle' tool by, what's-his-name, I forget the author now... (: ... but either way it should eliminate most of the above questions. At least on my installations - usually I changed a config file in some trivial way that would be easy to merge.
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