Hosting Provided By

(summary?) Re: [RFC] Support for using multiple CDs during installation

From: Christian Perrier <bubulle(at)debian.org>
Date: Thu Nov 01 2007 - 02:15:23 EDT

Quoting Frans Pop (elendil@planet.nl):
> Your mail seriously put me off for a few days, so I've given myself some
> extra time to think about it.

I went through all this discussion as I feel pretty important to get this issue solved and decided.

May I attempt to summarize how I see the "dispute" here? And then give my personal advice, based on this interpretation.

Frans' proposal adds an extra question when doing CD installs, to prompt users whether they want to use another CD or not. This, even if they did choose a network mirror before.

Joeyh's argument is being reluctant to extra questions and decide that users who did choose a network mirror will, by definition, not want to use extra CDs. He therefore proposes to partly "hide" the decision of scanning extra CD's in the question about network mirror. If users did choose a network mirror, then don't prompt them about extra CDs.

This main point brings in the way we want to support users without broadband available when they install a Debian system.

From Frans' rationale, we should always give them the opportunity to bring in extra packages from additionnal CDs. From Joeyh's one, they've answered the question themselves when choosing a network mirror.

From my personal experience of contact with various users and all exchanges I had up to now all around the world, I tend to prefer the deal of adding an extra question but giving much more flexibility to our users (see Holger's or Praveen's points).

Do you need help?

So, with all respect I have for the reluctance to add extra questions to defaults installs (imho, Joeyh's strong stance on this...as well as Frans' one when he acted as RM, has always kept D-I as "clean" as possible), I tend to favourize (en?) Frans approach, here.

My main reason for this is also that I think that much users will *always* choose a mirror even when they don't have broadband (or don't want to use it: think about corporate networks where using the Internet connections for installing systems is considered harmful even if that connection is broadband). So, actually pre-deciding that if they do so, they don't want to use extra CDs, is indeed an incorrect interpretation of the average user's behaviour wrt questions asked.

As a conclusion, I really would like to see Frans proposal implemented. The plan he proposed seems right to me.

-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org


application/pgp-signature attachment: Digital signature

Received on Thu Nov 1 02:15:43 2007

Contemporary messages sorted: [ By Date ] [ By Thread ] [ By Subject ] [ By Author ] [ By messages with attachments ]

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Wed Mar 19 2008 - 03:14:38 EDT