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

Marcel Moolenaar wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 03:02:40PM -0700, Scott Long wrote:
> 
>>1.  Keyboard multiplexer.
> 
> 
> I actually fail to stop thinking about a complete syscons and pcvt
> replacement. You know, the one and only console implementation that
> makes all others obsolete. Big plans, little time, yada yada yada...
> 
> 
>>2.  New installer.
> 
> 
> It may actually be interesting to see if we can make an expert
> system for this. When I think about implementing an installer (alas
> I've been doing that), I'm not so much interested in how things are
> packaged, or how it looks but rather what needs to be done, when and
> how all these actions relate and interact with each other. This is
> especially tricky when actions are triggered by the current
> configuration of the machine onto which one tries to install. Knowing
> all the possible activities and their dependencies should help
> establish a control flow through the installation process in such a
> way that users get asked only those questions that are relevent and
> also when it matters. One puts a UI on top of this to get a nice
> looking installer. At least, that's how I look at it...
> 

Yeah, I've had many similar thoughts.  The hard part of a new installer,
or any complex UI application, is the framework that ties events and
actions together.  The easy part is writing the modules on top of that
that do the discrete actions.  While I see quite a few rough edges in
the upper layers of the DF installer, it seems like quite a bit of work
is going into the framework, and that's why I'm actually so interested
in it.

Scott