[gentoo-dev] Thoughts about an installation program

[Thomas Flavel <thomasfl@cogs.susx.ac.uk>]

Hi,

I was wondering about the installer which will eventually "appear" for gentoo; what features would everyone like? I 
remember discussing this with Daniel a while ago; as far as I can remember the basic idea was as follows:

The user interface consisting of:

3 frames onscreen, the latter two being optional
- Main frame for the bulk of the interaction
- (read only?) Console at the bottom to show what is being done to your system as and when it happens; i.e. what you
type at the moment to install gentoo will appear here, if you want to see it?
- Split screen display with *usefull* context sensitive help in a frame on the left (should it be required)
and a few virtual terminals which are always useful ;) (respawning! I have seen distros where they don't which is
most irritating if you accidentally log out...)

The install process would probably be as follows:
- Boot from cd
- Edit partitions etc (front-end for GNUparted?)
- Copy across sys-base
- chroot and customise hostname etc
- setup networking
- download/install-from-cd optional packages
- setup users and groups
- reboot

Seems like a pretty normal install process to me, but then I thought a similar things for package systems until I came
across portage ;) Comments please

How would recovery work if there was a power cut half way through installation? I would like it to be able to pick up
from where it left off...

I think it would be nice to try and keep the heavily user-interactive things such as entering acount information all
in one place chronologically speaking, and then the system can be left to copy across things etc all at the same time.
On this note would it be better to ask for all of the input at once, cache it and *then* apply all of the changes? It
would be faster to setup imho that way.

- Tom