From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Dec 2 20:06:15 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9928B16A4CE for ; Thu, 2 Dec 2004 20:06:15 +0000 (GMT) Received: from smtpq1.home.nl (smtpq1.home.nl [213.51.128.196]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D5ED443D45 for ; Thu, 2 Dec 2004 20:06:14 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dodell@sitetronics.com) Received: from [213.51.128.135] (port=52989 helo=smtp4.home.nl) by smtpq1.home.nl with esmtp (Exim 4.30) id 1CZxDR-0004CY-IV; Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:06:13 +0100 Received: from cc740438-a.deven1.ov.home.nl ([82.75.136.183]:4430 helo=[192.168.1.100]) by smtp4.home.nl with esmtp (Exim 4.30) id 1CZxDM-0007gS-L5; Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:06:08 +0100 Message-ID: <41AF75B1.6070306@sitetronics.com> Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:06:09 +0100 From: "Devon H. O'Dell" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.9 (Windows/20041103) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jon Drews References: <41AE3F80.1000506@freebsd.org> <41AE55D7.8020709@freebsd.org> <41AEA4B8.6080508@acm.org> <20041202075530.3b33db1b.flynn@energyhq.es.eu.org> <20041202190337.GY79646@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au> <8cb27cbf04120211553b4304bf@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <8cb27cbf04120211553b4304bf@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-AtHome-MailScanner-Information: Please contact support@home.nl for more information X-AtHome-MailScanner: Found to be clean cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: My project wish-list for the next 12 months X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 20:06:15 -0000 Jon Drews wrote: > On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 19:19:12 +0000, Eric Kjeldergaard wrote: > >>I want to preface by saying that I certainly don't think a GUI >>installer should replace what FreeBSD ships with now. > > > I agree with Eric. As a FreeBSD desktop user, I think (IMHO) that a > gui installer is a high cost low yield item. It would take a lot of > effort to make it work right. My experience with both YaST and > Mandrakes installer was that it took several releases for the bugs to > get worked out. IIRC SuSE introduced the GUI YaST2 in 7.0 and I think > it was working pretty well by 8.0 but that was over the period of a > year. A couple of the features of our installer are that it is scriptable and that all of the handling of the installation is done in the back end. This means that the only bugs which would exist in a GUI front end (assuming the backend works, as it does) to the installer would be problems with the widget library or with how it is used. It'd be pretty simple to extend the installer to use pretty much any graphical toolkit. Its client/server design, in that sense, makes it very suitable for any purpose. FWIW, I saw on another response to this thread that the installer should be based on a Live CD. Ours is, and is used in the FreeSBIE project to install FreeBSD to the disk, if desired. Kind regards, Devon H. O'Dell