Date: Mon, 1 Sep 1997 23:45:02 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: sysinstall (was Re: Conclusion to "NT vs. Unix" debate) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970901233729.307W-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <7098.873094588@time.cdrom.com>
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On Sun, 31 Aug 1997, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > Perhaps I'm just biased from my previous installation experience, but > the way I see this working is as a series of linked "black boxes", > each black box representing some functional block of installation > hackery with an API for getting/setting its internal state and > executing it. You allow boxes to be named, to depend on other boxes > and to be arbitrarily chained together themselves. A "novice install" > then becomes a simple matter of creating a chain of operations and > starting the user off at the head of it. You underestimate the difficulty in getting the chaining right simultaneously from a usability point of view and a technical point of view, but otherwise, yes. For a tradeoff example, do you do the partitioning or distribution selection first? If you do partitioning first, the distribution selection can advise you about what will fit. But, if the distributions are selected first, then the user (or the system) can make more informed choices about partitioning. Things like that do tend to muck with the otherwise elegant chain of black boxes. :) -john
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