What if we changed how some items on the main menu are displayed, so the short version (before the whole installer is loaded) looked something like this:
Language: English
Country: United States
Keyboard: us
Network: eth0 using DHCP
Hostname: debianbox
Mirror: http.us.debian.org
Mode: novice
Continue with install, using above settings
Execute a shell
Reboot the system
languagechooser would continue to prompt at high priority, but
the other items at the top of this menu would ask their questions at
medium priority, and come up with reasonale defaults when possible.
So, the user boots d-i, and selects her language (English). Next
main-menu runs through countrychooser (default to US for English),
kbd-chooser (default to us), netcfg (works just like it does now, except
hostname config might be split out to a hostcfg), and cdebconf-priority
(leaves priority at the default, high). As a last stage to each of
these, they modify their main menu item, (by substing into the debconf
template for it), to indicate how they are configured.
Now it gets to that blank line in the menu, and this is the ugly part --
that blank line lowers the priority to medium if it is not already
medium or lower. Perhaps their are better ways to accomplish this, but
the effect is that main-menu appears, like I've shown it above, with the
cursor on the "Continue the install" item. Now the user can go back and
select anything she wants to change.
Note that at medium priority, netcfg will prompt whether you want dhcp
or static networking, before probing for dhcp. This will solve a
complaint a few have voiced in install reports: It can be annoying to be
forced to use dhcp just because there is a dhcp server on the network.
Also, note that cdebconf-priority has been moved up into this top part
of the main menu again, and users can select it if they want to change
their priority at this point. I expect that it would only list two
choices, novice and expert. This will largely do away with the need to
boot the installer in expert mode; instead you can just switch to expert
mode at this point.
Once the user is done making any tweaks to her country, etc, she can
pick the "Continue with install" item, which will reset the debconf
priority to high (unless the user has lowered it to low), and d-i will
get on with loading the rest of itself and move on to partitioning.
This seems to give us what we want in terms of reduced number of
questions, without large reogranisations of how this part of d-i works,
and without losing modularity.
One little problem is that it assumes that we can fit everything we want
to be in this initial menu into the initrd. My example above adds only
cdebconf-priority to what is already on even our smallest (floppy)
initrd, so that should be doable.
Mm, I think that this may also be better for translators on some levels,
since it's probably easier to consisely translate "Language" rather than
"Choose your language". Of course, the values that are substituted into
the menu items ("English", "United States", "novice", etc), would need
to be appropriatly translated too.
This next part is where it gets really out there, but read on if you
dare.. ;-)
Now, I think it would be really nice if something similar could be done
for the second half of the install, so she gets a nice little menu along
these lines after d-i loads itself:
Partitioning: automatic
Kernel version: 2.4.24-1-k7
Boot loader: grub
Install Debian, using above settings
Execute a shell
Reboot the system
And then if she wants, she can change her boot loader to lilo, or
pick a different kernel, or do manual partitioning. But there are
problems.. First that this little menu would need to be in a different
menu than main-menu, or it would have all the rest of main-menu before
it. Secondly, it would have to defer actually installing grub until the
"Install Debian" step, so these menu items would have to be new things
that only did the configuration. So we'd probably not be able to do this
without considerably more work.
--
see shy jo
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