[arch-releng] the future of quickinst

[Dan McGee]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 10:05 AM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> quickinst:
> http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=installer.git;a=blob;f=quickinst;h=23e41ccbec63e7527b2006ffc3552b99510862c3;hb=80ca34643e1c3db5ac5bbc856590ae44b559a6a1
> Is there anyone who actually uses this? If so, can you tell me why?
>
>
> It's stated quickinst is meant for people who want to mkfs/mount their
> filesystems themselves, okay I understand that. But, as a "consequence"
> you can only install the base packages, your keyboard/time/.. settings
> don't go into /mnt/etc/rc.conf automatically, you need to install the
> bootloader manually (which means having to mount some things yourself,
> chroot etc.
>
> What is the advantage of this over just using the normal installer and
> skipping the steps you don't want to do?

Because the normal installer is a manual process. You can't easily do
a remote install on 30 machines with a dialog-based installer, while
with quickinst that becomes quite easy.

> I'm wondering if shouldn't just drop it.
>
> Note that with AIF it's quite easy to implement a "partial procedure",
> which is a procedure to do one or a few specific things. (right now
> there are partial procedures which let you do keymap/font selection,
> disk/partition/filesystem config, and network setup).  I could add one
>  to let the user just do package selection & installation, for
> example.
>
> Dieter