Interview with Adam Di Carlo (Debian Boot)

robstah writes: "The installer is the heart of any Operating System, Debian is no different. The mature but ageing boot-floppies installer will rear its head for the last time in woody. In this interview with Adam Di Carlo, one of the lead developers of this system we investigate the past, present and future of the Debian installation system ready for the upcoming release of woody: The next generation of Debian."

Comments

Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken

[Lethyos]

The Debian installer IMHO, is very elegant, smooth, and has a near perfect balance of functionality for power users and entry level users alike. Power users generally get the flexability they need, and entry level users only need to contribute a little bit more thought than say, RedHat's installer. I say, KISS, and hang onto this installer for a little while longer. The only real problem I've ever seen with Debian's installer was the dselect stage, where most users choke completely. That however, has become an option and users may now run the simple and straight foward tasksel util. If the Debian people are going to try and replace this installer, I certainly hope they keep the existing paradigms around for those of us who love Debian as it is (it's the only perfect distro in my book).

On the other hand, what Debian really needs to do is enhance and extend the aforementions tasksel utility. Tasksel has the right idea, but it doesn't go far enough. It's not very extensive and it'd be nice to break things down into smaller groups without having to jump all the way over to dselect. For example, from tasksel, installing the TeX packages is clear, but maybe I want all the immediately necessary LaTeX components and not all the utilities that convert TeX to every other format imaginable for documents. But make this a hierarchial option that's hidden in tree form under this task. That'll give us more middle ground between tasksel and dselect.

Re:Graphical installer?

[psamuels]

In other words, we'll see a graphical Debian installer around 2010 or so?

Yeah, they do have long release cycles, but why exactly do you want a graphical installer anyway?

I've never quite understood this point. Bringing up the GUI early in the install process adds a bunch of complexity and failure cases, and to my mind anyway, doesn't really add any functionality.

What features of an installer do you have in mind that can be accomplished within a GUI but not with a text-based UI? And don't say "to impress people who confuse pretty with advanced" - why the **** should we care about their opinions?

One thing might be "to fit a reasonable amount of information on one screen" - which is why I boot with "vga=1" meaning 80x50 cells, and I think this should be made the default on boot-floppies, although I understand why it isn't (it would screw over those .001% of users that don't have VGA-compatible video cards or BIOSes).

This is like those BIOS setup screens that come with icon boxes, scroll bars and PS/2 mouse support. Does anyone find them easier to use than the venerable text-based BIOS setup screens? I don't. I find them confusing. Easy-to-use does not imply graphical, or vice versa.