From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=) Subject: Re: Come back and graphical installer Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2018 14:48:00 +0200 Message-ID: <87woqajgfz.fsf@gnu.org> References: <87lg6sejwa.fsf@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:42435) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gEZco-0007hF-Ut for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 22 Oct 2018 08:48:03 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gEZcn-0000U6-UL for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 22 Oct 2018 08:48:02 -0400 In-Reply-To: <87lg6sejwa.fsf@gmail.com> (Mathieu Othacehe's message of "Sat, 20 Oct 2018 21:07:49 +0600") List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Mathieu Othacehe Cc: Guix-devel Hello Mathieu! Mathieu Othacehe 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=E2=80=99s 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 =E2=80=98connmanctl=E2=80=99 (which could perhaps provide tig= hter control over error reports, etc.), but that=E2=80=99s 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=E2=80=99m really happy that you took a stab at this and I=E2= =80=99m looking forward to running test images! BTW, if your bicycle trip stops by Paris, do not miss : you=E2=80=99d= have nice stories to tell us about. :-) Cheers, Ludo=E2=80=99.