Re: My project wish-list for the next 12 months

Scott Long said:
> 2.  New installer.  I know some people still consider this a joke, but
> the reality is that sysinstall is no longer state of the art.  It's
> fairly good at the simple task that it does, but it's becoming harder
> and harder to fix bugs and extend functionality in it.  It's also
> fairly unfriendly to those of us who haven't been using it since 1995.
> The DFly folks have some very interesting work in this area
> (www.bsdinstaller.com) and it would be very good to see if we can
> collaborate with them on it.

I've spent a good deal of time taking notes and diagrams of what I wanted
from a new installer. However, time constraints have kept me from actually
putting any of it to code yet.

I've looked at the DFly installed quite a bit and I like what it offers,
however, I have a few complaints with it. Quite honestly I wasn't
impressed with the code.

Another issue I had with the dfly installer was one point I believe needs
to be central to any next-gen installer. Internationalisation. My idea of
an installer front-end would use a dynamically loadable language library.
All resources of the front-end (ie strings, images, etc) would be packaged
into a seperate language-pack. These language-packs can then be grouped
together into a language library. A few basic packs would be distributed
with the default library but other libraries could easily be substituted
to make localized distribution sets with little trouble.

The benefit of this is that instead of translating the code you would only
need to translate the language-(pack|library). I think this would greatly
simplify translation and make a seperation between language and the
front-end code.

This is where my complaint with Dfly comes in, upon reading the source,
there are string constants everywhere. Perhaps I am missing something, but
this means that in order to supply localization support much work would
need to be done to find some scheme that doesn't mean translating the
source.

I have quite a bit of notes on seperation and even down to specific
methods and sub-libraries necessary for the back-end. Perhaps if I have
some time soon I'll put it into a PDF somewhere.

Has anyone else put much thought into this?

-- 
Ryan Sommers
ryans_at_gamersimpact.com