Installer: again

Robert Garrett rg70 at sbcglobal.net
Sat Feb 14 11:42:34 PST 2004


At the risk of creating yet another discussion in which nothing
is accomplished, I need to clear up the following Items..

I have had the understanding that the plan for the new installer would
be python based.

It must have a console interface
It must run under X

It will have two parts, the fdisk, disklabel part and the configuration part

Rather than rewrite libdisk, and teach fdisk, and disklabel to use it I
have decided to write the disk mechanism in python as well.

now a few more details of what i'm working on..

The installer will be module based, i.e for everything that needs to be
configured there will be a module.

There will be a base module for each system network, disk, X, console...

each module will register itself with the installer, telling it what 
information it needs to configure that option.

The installer itself will know how to display information and get user
input. i.e. a checkbox, listbox, whatever. It will also know how to
do that both on the console and under X

There was some discussion about using a webserver for the part of the 
installer this is still a viable option with this design.

This also means by nature, that it will be very easy to add things to
the configuration mechanism.

scripting the installer would be as simple as playing back the user input
to each module.


you will be able to do things like

Dragon network to configure networking options
or Dragon network interface to configure a network interface..

No I am not sold on Dragon as the name for this thing, it's just what
came to mind as I was typing this.


Anyway just a few thoughts on the direction I am taking..

Robert Garrett














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