Date: Sun, 30 Nov 1997 21:52:24 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Alex <garbanzo@hooked.net> Cc: Jacques Vidrine <nectar@NECTAR.COM>, "hackers@freebsd.org" <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Out of Box experience (Was: Re: How is selection made of what goes into CDrom?) Message-ID: <19737.880955544@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 30 Nov 1997 21:33:14 PST." <Pine.BSF.3.96.971130212834.13855A-100000@zippy.dyn.ml.org>
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> That was me who suggested _that_. I still think that a graphical > counterpart of sorts to sysinstall or its successor, (which you are > writing right? ;-) ) is something, that would certianly add a little bit > of polish to FBSD, and perhaps increase its userbase. While I'm kinda Sure would, but the bootstrapping issues are hard. To use an X based anything, be it Qt or (to be more politically correct) Tk based, requires that you get the user fully into a running X environment first and that's often very hard, especially if the user in question happens to be missing a couple of blades on his propeller, if you get my drift. I've got a machine here which can't even run the VGA16 server on its funky graphics card, and I've heard others say the same of various laptops and other funky gfx card infested systems. Considering that a goodly number of those might not even want to *run* X, it hardly makes sense to tell them that they still need it just to install the system. An alternative, of course, is to provide an installer which does one or the other based on some initial user dialog, but writing such a dual-headed installer is also *hard* if you only want to have to keep one central source code base updated every time you add something to a menu or change the ordering of the install (and that *is* the way you would want to do it, the option of maintaining two installers in parallel being a very painful one over the long term). That requires a fairly abstract UI subsystem which is able to use arbitrary interface objects in dialoging with the user and can use any given set on the fly. I haven't seen this holy grail of interface technology available for free yet, so don't hold your breath on that ever happening unless you become a really good C programmer sooner than expected. :-) I suspect that what will happen instead, given the time pressures currently on the "new installer" project (and its stunning lack of substantial progress so far), is that a reasonably decent CUI library like TurboVision will simply get used in place of the egregious libdialog, the X-heads continuing to run it inside an xterm and just coping with that fact. :-) Jordan
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