Alan McKinnon wrote:
This mythical thing - a working installer - probably does not exist and likely never will.
This may be true, and it certainly is the case right now. But that's not a good reason to reject one out of hand before you even see it.
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.
When I run through an install by following the handbook, I feel more like a script interpreter than a human being. The only real decisions I make when installing Gentoo are:
* How to allocate my hard drive (sane default: what the handbook suggests) * What mirrors to use (sane default: what the handbook suggests -- mirrorselect) * Which equally usable option from the possible loggers, crons, dhcp clients, and boot loaders (sane default: who cares? just pick one) * What book to read for the rest of the time I'm staring at emerge waiting to have to type something else. (sane default: the handbook, duh.)
Everything else is just copying and pasting out of the handbook. That's practically the definition of an automatable process.
--Mikr
