From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 4.0.0 (2022-12-14) on finch.gentoo.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.1 required=5.0 tests=DMARC_NONE,MAILING_LIST_MULTI autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=4.0.0 Received: from obelix.spectraweb.ch (obelix.plusnet.ch [194.158.230.8]) by chiba.3jane.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6455FABBCB for ; Sat, 20 Jul 2002 17:15:32 -0500 (CDT) Received: from seul.org (adsl-62-167-200-12.adslplus.ch [62.167.200.12]) by obelix.spectraweb.ch (8.11.2/8.9.3/SuSE Linux 8.9.3-0.1) with ESMTP id g6KMFLA08287; Sun, 21 Jul 2002 00:15:21 +0200 Message-ID: <3D39E0FF.9030604@seul.org> Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 00:15:27 +0200 From: Marko Mikulicic User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020712 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: verwilst@gentoo.org Cc: gentoo-dev Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] I am not a touch typest. Wish I were. References: <000b01c22fbd$231f1840$0a00a8c0@elric> <002701c22fe0$453869e0$6401a8c0@internal.lan> <200207202357.13941.verwilst@gentoo.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: gentoo-dev-admin@gentoo.org Errors-To: gentoo-dev-admin@gentoo.org X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.6 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Gentoo Linux developer list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: X-Archives-Salt: c5f109a2-00a7-47f9-ad48-84b01d42ba25 X-Archives-Hash: 500c3de510973223a14ad1c8b55d8b5e Bart Verwilst wrote: > We're working on a graphical installer... > I'm planning to make it easier to install than Windows :) > Ofcourse this will be optional, and the current install will always be > available, and that's a garantee! :o) > > PS: This is a calling to everybody interessed, if you have ideas, drawings > from the layout, you're a talented graphics dude, or something, don't > hesitate to email me directly, we can use some help on this one :) What I like from the current handcrafted installation is that you see what is going on and you see that the installation is not a magical expert only thing, but just the matter of copying the files on a mounted filesystem. I like to install gentoo on machines running another distro or another gentoo disk because I can still use the machine and I have a more confortable environment where partitioning the disk etc. I think that there are some tasks which could be useful even for "experts": 1) aided partitioning. I thought of having a file describing the partition structure (proplist, xml, whatever is easy to write and process with a (python?) script) fstypes and mount points. Then a script would take this file and make the partitions, create the filesystems, and output a fstab, to be copied in the newly created etc. I like to think of it as a text file, but it would be nice if the optional graphical installation could share the same format for storing user configuration, before doing the job, so that users can decide which parts of the graphical installation are useful (or just doing all auto if he wishes). I wanting to help writing this one, if you need help. 2) device probing. I think it should be good if the graphical install (better than windows :-) would well divided from the logic that does device autodetection, so that users which doesn't want gfx install can also benefit from its detections. For example, once I needed to configure a asus ISDN card but I didn't know that asus was only the name on the box, and the cards was totaly incompatible with asus driver. Mandrake probed the device and configured correctly (or at least told me the chipset) (btw. lspci -> unknown). 3) a use flag browser. It was confusing for me at first, and still it is, to see many use flags in /etc/make.globals and having to see what is in and what I should add, and what is available. I'd like to have a use flag list and some simple way of activating/deactivating which will output /etc/make.conf. I would find these things useful to save time and typing, retaining all the power of gentoo installation. I'd like that any work done in the graphical install could be reused separately to provide a custom installation method, if wanted. I mean, someone could build on top of it a complete graphical install, someone could only use a minimal ncurses based filesystem configuration tool... but without duplicating code. What do you think? If, eventually, the "config" files where expressed in xml, what is the littles packet for xml handling that wound fit in the installation environment. I heard that tinyqt will be used for portage2, and it has a xml parser, but it would be nice to write it in a scripting language (python?). I'm not a python guru. I wrote some little xml handling script but I don't know which parser is better to use. Any ideas ? Marko Mikulicic