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

Ryan Sommers wrote:
> 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?

Yes, we have. I18n is something that we're actively working on 
implementing, and is something that we take quite seriously. I know that 
not very many FreeBSD developers use IRC, but we are all available in 
#dfinstaller on EFNet. We're using gettext for this at the moment.

Kind regards,

Devon H. O'Dell