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Re: coworker's impression of debian

Why are we having this discussion on debian-private?

strombrg@hydra.acs.uci.edu (Dan Stromberg)  wrote on 04.04.97 in <3345946A.73B9@hydra.acs.uci.edu>:

> The main thing he said, and he said this five or six times, is "dselect
> is horrible."  I have to agree.  I don't use dselect, myself.  We really
> have to get rid of it, one way or another.

Well, it has its failings, but I still like it better than *any* other  
installation tool I have ever used.

I think its main failings are

* being so insistent about dependancy handling (this includes recommends  
etc) - it must be done at once, and it must be repeated ad nauseam

* not really being written for a package list as large as we have today  
(some sort of hierarchical handling is needed)

These two points look fixable to me. They'd probably be fixed already if  
Ian J. didn't have this attack of Real Life[tm].

Oh yes, and a novice "I don't know what all these are, just make me a  
reasonable system for XYZ" mode would probably also be nice.

> He also said he didn't like it that the install process asked So Many
> questions, he'd prefer it if everything just installed, and then you
> could configure it yourself later.  Personally, I think the ability to
> be walked thru configuration is a plus (even tho I don't use that
> either), but it shouldn't be required.  Novice users need it, experts
> sometimes want it, and sometimes don't.

Yes, at least potentially decoupling that would be nice. Of course, that's  
not really dselect, but it could be made so, whenever we finally get our  
general configuration solution we've been talking about.

> Finally, he mentioned that he didn't have a mouse attached to his system
> during the install - so when he said "yes, I want to configure X now" he
> wound up having to telnet in and kill some things off to continue the
> install.  He probably could have used ctrl-alt-backspace, but you get
> the point - it wasn't clear what to do, and this guy knows unix (many
> variants) pretty well.

I've complained about that one before. Anything - anything at all - that  
switches VTs, should ask first, and if approved, wait until the user  
switched back. Some explanation how to do it would also not be bad.

> He did seem to have a positive impression of debian going nonprofit, the

"going"?!

> large number of packages available, and the open development model.


MfG Kai