Some thoughts on installers

Some thoughts on installers

[Nikita Karetnikov]

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I know it’s too early to talk about these issues.  But I’m afraid that
I’ll forget about them, and we’ll make the same mistakes as everyone
else.

I haven’t seen an installer that isn’t organized in a step-by-step
fashion.  A user is forced to press the “Next” button every 5 minutes or
so.  It’s impossible to do anything else because that will increase the
installation time.  So the user has to sit in front of the computer for
40 minutes and wait for the button to become active.

I assume that installers are written in such a way because it’s easier
for developers.  Let’s not repeat this mistake when we write our own.
Instead, I propose to get the needed information beforehand (on the
first screen).  Then it’d be only necessary to press “Install.”  A user
could check the progress bar and be free to do something else.

Finally, I also suggest to reduce the number of questions.  There are
installers that allow to choose between a basic mode and an advanced
mode.  But even in the basic mode a user has to deal with partitioning.
I assume that doesn’t look basic to many people.

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Re: Some thoughts on installers

[Ludovic Courtès]

Nikita Karetnikov <nikita@karetnikov.org> skribis:

> I haven’t seen an installer that isn’t organized in a step-by-step
> fashion.  A user is forced to press the “Next” button every 5 minutes or
> so.  It’s impossible to do anything else because that will increase the
> installation time.  So the user has to sit in front of the computer for
> 40 minutes and wait for the button to become active.
>
> I assume that installers are written in such a way because it’s easier
> for developers.  Let’s not repeat this mistake when we write our own.
> Instead, I propose to get the needed information beforehand (on the
> first screen).  Then it’d be only necessary to press “Install.”  A user
> could check the progress bar and be free to do something else.

The idea is to start with NixOS-style declarative configuration.  You
provide a configuration file that defines the structure of the system to
be installed (or you generate that file via a M-x customize kind of user
interface, say), and then run the install process, which instantiates
the whole thing non-interactively.

Ludo’.