Some critics about Ubuntu / New Installing

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 12:04 -0500, David Walker wrote:
> I mean if 
> Ubuntu is for the new user I would think we would have more friendlier 
> installer.  I know that some people may be scared of the curses based 
> install and bail.

I think that the type of display used by the installer is not what
defines how "friendly" it is.  Ease of use and ease of extending the
installer is not improved by a fancy graphical facade with dancing
penguins.  Spending time to implement eye candy would be a waste of
precious time resources until the fundamental installer framework is
fully operational.

Debian Installer has a very interesting multi-tier architecture.  The
interface you see is produced by 'debconf'.  It uses a template file
that defines the text to show for the questions, along with the data
type of the answer, a default answer, and a data key under which the
response is stored.  There's an interface script that uses debconf
machinery to utilize that template...  It prompts the user, and stores
the answer in a little data base.  That data is then used by another
layer, which actually performs the actions of the installer.

The beauty of this architecture is that the interface front end can be
replaced by any plug-in compatible interface displayer implementation.
There's the curses dialog based one you've seen, and a plain text "dumb
terminal" version that might work well with a screen reader for a
visually handicapped user.  Work is being done on one that will use the
GTK+ on framebuffer, giving it a nice smooth GUI appearance.  Perhaps a
good artist can create some dancing penguins for us?

-- 
     Karl Hegbloom                 ,''`.
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