On Sunday 05 April 2009 00:07:12 Mike Edenfield wrote: > 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.
I'm not doing that. There isn't a claimed working installer to evaluate. I said that "this *class of thing* called an installer is unlikely to work right on gentoo". I did not say "every installer written or to be written must necessarily be rejected" > > 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. Then why has it not been done if it's so conceptually simple? Maybe because it's a *seriously* hard problem to solve. But, the onus is actually on you to produce a working installer that does the right thing correctly and thereby to prove your position as correct. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
