Re: Come back and graphical installer

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello Mathieu!

Mathieu Othacehe <m.othacehe@gmail.com> skribis:

> First mail since a while ! I'm currently finishing a long bicycle trip,
> and was able to start hacking again.

Welcome back, I hope you had a good time!

> I picked up the "Graphical installer" task. After studying the branch
> wip-installer-2, I choose to rewrite it for multiple reasons:
>
> * I found the guile-ncurses approach too low level and think that many
>   bugs in the current installer could be avoided with a higher level
>   library.
> * As suggested by Ludo[1], using a network manager seems to be a better
>   idea that calling iw, ip and other low level tools.
> * I prefer relying on a Guile-parted library rather than calling cfdisk
>   and again interfacing with various partioning tools.
>
> While a lot of work have been accomplished by John and Danny, fixing the
> above issues mean rewrite it almost completely anyway.
>
> So, I wrote Guile bindings for newt[2], which can be found here[3]. Newt
> is the library used by Debian installer and the Anaconda installer
> (RedHat, Centos, ...).
>
> I choose to interface with Connman via connmanctl. It would have been
> better to use DBus but it implies writing Guile-dbus and I did not have
> the courage.
>
> Based on this, I have a first draft for a new installer here[4]. I plan
> to push it on a wip savannah branch soon. Most of the basic features are
> implemented and the last missing part it the partioning one (also the
> bigger ...).

Woow, that’s an impressive comeback!  :-)

The installer you wrote does seem to be much more compact that the one
John and Danny wrote, which seems to confirm your argument in favor of
Newt rather than Ncurses.

I really like the clean interfaces you can came up with for networking,
keymaps, timezones, etc.

For Connman, I wonder if we could talk directly to the daemon without
going through ‘connmanctl’ (which could perhaps provide tighter control
over error reports, etc.), but that’s a minor issue.

> I will soon share some iso files to have some feedbacks. Even if it
> might be too late already, I think that releasing the 1.0 with a
> graphical installer would be a big plus.

Definitely.  I’m really happy that you took a stab at this and I’m
looking forward to running test images!

BTW, if your bicycle trip stops by Paris, do not miss
<https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/ParisGathering2018>: you’d have
nice stories to tell us about.  :-)

Cheers,
Ludo’.