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

Jon Drews wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 19:19:12 +0000, Eric Kjeldergaard <kjelderg_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>I want to preface by saying that I certainly don't think a GUI
>>installer should replace what FreeBSD ships with now.  
> 
> 
>  I agree with Eric. As a FreeBSD desktop user, I think (IMHO) that a
> gui installer is a high cost low yield item. It would take a lot of
> effort to make it work right. My experience with both YaST and
> Mandrakes installer was that it took several releases for the bugs to
> get worked out. IIRC SuSE introduced the GUI YaST2 in 7.0 and I think
> it was working pretty well by 8.0 but that was over the period of a
> year.

A couple of the features of our installer are that it is scriptable and 
that all of the handling of the installation is done in the back end. 
This means that the only bugs which would exist in a GUI front end 
(assuming the backend works, as it does) to the installer would be 
problems with the widget library or with how it is used.

It'd be pretty simple to extend the installer to use pretty much any 
graphical toolkit. Its client/server design, in that sense, makes it 
very suitable for any purpose.

FWIW, I saw on another response to this thread that the installer should 
be based on a Live CD. Ours is, and is used in the FreeSBIE project to 
install FreeBSD to the disk, if desired.

Kind regards,

Devon H. O'Dell