On Friday 03 April 2009 22:11:28 Mike Edenfield wrote: > On 4/3/2009 3:38 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > > there is no installer anymore. And that is a good thing. > > I will agree that an installer doesn't belong near the top of anyones > "show stopper" list of Gentoo defects. Gentoo doesn't *need* an > installer and all previous attempts at one have been less than > successful. We can all certainly get along fine without one. > > But can you really provide a non-condescending, *rational* argument > explaining why it would be an actively detrimental idea to have a > working installer for Gentoo? Why, if some person appeared tomorrow > with a fully functional, debugged, tested, flexible, easy to use, > fully-handbook-compliant, *optional* drop-in installation process, why > that would be a bad thing?
This mythical thing - a working installer - probably does not exist and likely never will. There are just too many decisions the human must make while installing Gentoo and too many of them do not have sane defaults. So the installer is still going to ask the human to make decisions, it is going to provide a list of possibilities and say "pick one", and then automate whatever that means. Now, this stuff is all in the handbook anyway; google, the docs, ls* and dmesg still give the answers, they still have to be used, so actually an installer changes nothing. The same questions will still be asked on the forums and here and nothing will really change. Which isn't surprising, an installer is just a front end to the same back end. gentoo is not a binary distro, it does not work like a binary distro. You are not limited to the narrow choices provided you by the packagers. You can do anything you like that the sources support, and an installer author is unlikely to ever know everything about that. Besides, we already have a perfect installer. You are just all confused about it's name. Folk think it's called "genkernel" or "LiveCD" or some such. Actually, it goes by these names: bash vi tar emerge Note that these are the *exact* *same* *tools* you are going to use every day after the install is done. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
