On 10/31/05, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> > Another thought would be an approach similar to the installer irc
> > channel where you have to read through a really long FAQ before you
> > are told how to download the stage1 or 2 tarballs.
>
> My personal impression is that this will piss off the end user. This
> works for the installer *channel* but would never work for a CD
> installation. It's simply asinine to ask the user to jump through hoops
> to do what they want.


Well I wasn't really referring to a CD (but in this case read the MS license
agreement when installing Windoze I think that would be the equivalent of
this :). What I was really referring to was putting up some sort of scenario
like that to download the stage1/2 tarballs.

Even if we stopped shipping stage1 tarballs, there's nothing stopping
> some inventive user from grabbing a stage3 tarball and making a stage1
> tarball from it using catalyst. It only takes a couple hours on a
> decent machine.


True but if they fire up catalyst to make a stage1 chances are they aren't
going to be so dumb as to request support when their use flag combinations
don't work. The problem is ignorant users and most of them can't us
catalyst.

My point is that once again, we're not *really* removing choice even if
> we were to drop the earlier stages altogether, we're just making the
> user do the work themselves and removing one more abysmal headache and
> QA nightmare from our already enormous and growing list of stuff that
> has been delaying the past few releases well beyond our scheduled
> release dates.
>

Regardless of how foolish you may think it is to do a stage1 install (and it
may well be) I would still greatly appreciate the stage1 tarballs even if
you refuse to support them. Personally I have never needed support on a
stage1 that I couldn't get by simply RTFM.

-Mike

--
________________________________
Michael E. Crute
Software Developer
SoftGroup Development Corporation

Linux, because reboots are for installing hardware.
"In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates?"