one of the biggest qualms with the windows installer is that various
dialogs pop up dispersed throughout the installation, forcing the user
to constantly attend to the system (merely to hit "next" when the
appropriate time comes).

it appears to me that the debian-installer suffers this usability
concern as well.  for example, user set up and configuration comes after
disk partioning (which can take a reasonble amount of time especially
ext3 on large disks).  if user set up were before disk partitioning,
then the user would not need to wait as the installer could continue
directly into package download and installation.

i suggest that some time be spent considering the installation order of
operations, and making sure that the user is not being forced to attend
the system unnecessarily.

mike

As far as I know there is absolutely no way to have user-setup being
run before partman in the current way the installer is working.


We can of course keep this opened for a mythical future version where
everything would be broken to change the order for user interaction,
but I consider this extremely unlikely to happen some day.

If you feel that this BR should not be closed, please reopen it,
reassign it to user-setup and tag it "wontfix".

Is that actually true anymore? user-setup only touches /target in
user-setup-apply; user-setup-ask seems to not need /target at all, and
user-setup-udeb doesn't have any special dependencies either. Of course,
if something like bug #364526 is implemented, user-setup could come to
need a /target to run password checking code, or the like. But for now,
it doesn't seem to need it.

It seems that it could run user-setup-ask before localechooser, if we
really wanted it to. :-) Before partman is certianly a possibility.

There are certianly d-i components that need a full /target and/or
partitioned system before they can ask their questions. clock-setup,
apt-setup, pkgsel, and grub-installer come to mind. However that doesn't
seem like a good reason to close this bug out of hand.

That said, I don't actually see any benefit from running user-setup
before partman, as opposed to before apt-setup. In either case it's
running as part of a block of questions that all happen quite close
together with minimal wait time for the user.

Yes, if it were being run after base-installer, that would be another
matter. As it is now I feel we have correctly grouped the questions that
relate to the installed system.

After the discussion that happened in this bug's log, it is clear that
the D-I team has no intent to change the order of questions in the
installation process.

The user setup comes after the partitioning step, and moving its
questions elsewhere would mean moving the clock setup questions as
well, which is technically not possible before the disk is
partitioned.

So, the current location of user setting questions is the current best
compromise. Hence closing this bug report.

reopen 382889
thanks

why can't this information be stored in ram until disk partitioning
finishes, then transfered to the right location on disk?

mike

Michael Gilbert wrote:

Because the clock setup step depends on os-prober, which depends on the
disk having already been partitioned so that it can detect which other
operating systems are still installed.

ok, i was trying to suggest ideas to make things simpler and more
logical for the user.  if this is impossible because of dependencies,
then i am willing to accept that.

thanks for the hard work on the installer!

mike

btw, why can't os-prober run before partitioning and the correct
itself after partitioning?

mike

i just did a new install.  the order of operations (for a non-expert
install) is as follows (with time into install and user prompts
noted):

minute    operation
------------------------------------------------------------------------
0            config local/language (prompt)
0            load d-i from cdrom
1            config hostname (prompt)
1            detect hardware
2            config disk partitioning (prompt)
2            disk partitioning
5            config timezone (prompt)
5            config users (prompt)
5            install base system
10          config mirror (prompt)
10          test connection to mirror
11          config popcon (prompt)
11          config tasksel (prompt)
11          download packages
41          install packages
51          config grub (prompt)
51          reboot

it may perhaps seem not much of a burden to require the user to attend
to the installer for the first 11 minutes, but nevertheless, that is
11 minutes of their life not spent on other things.  i think if the
prompts were aggregated to proceed in sequence, it would be much
better.  i understand that this is not an easy task, but it should be
worth it for users that install a lot of systems.

here is the order of operations that i suggest (disregarding current
perceived technical limitations).  information entered into the
prompts can be stored in a temporary location until the disk is
available to move the info to the right place:

          config local/language (prompt)
          load d-i from cdrom
          config hostname (prompt)
          config timezone (prompt)
          config users (prompt)
          detect hardware
          config mirror (prompt)
          test connection to mirror
          config popcon (prompt)
          config tasksel (prompt)
          config grub (prompt)
          config disk partitioning (prompt)
          disk partitioning
          install base system
          download packages
          install packages
          reboot

if these comments seem useful, please reopen, otherwise i'll finally
let this go.  its up to you.

mike

When a maintainer closes a BR giving a reason, please don't reopen the BR
just because you don't understand that reason. If you really want to
discuss this further, spend some time trying to understand the code
first.

Closing this BR again.

Cheers,
FJP
D-I Release Manager

Op 13-04-2007 om 23:31 schreef Michael Gilbert:

For those users there is "preseeding".

See the preseeding section in the manual for details.



Cheers
Geert Stappers

ok, so if that's the case, why can't the prompts be upfront and store
the user choices to the preseed file?

mike

Michael Gilbert wrote:

Because nobody wrote a preseed-wizard?

You can easily put all the answers for the questions asked after the partitioning  in a preseed
file. Then no operator intervention is required after you set up the partitions until it reboots
into the new system. On some machines you may have to remove the CD before the reboot.

Michael Gilbert wrote:

reopen 382889
retitle 382889 user-setup: use preseeding to group all d-i dialogs upfront together
severity 382889 wishlist
thank you

hello, i was never fully satisfied by the resolution of this bug, so i am
reopening it.

the key wish that i have is that all installer dialogs happen upfront so i
don't have to spend so much time babysitting the installation.  i suggest
using the existing preseeding functionality as a potential solution.

thank you for your consideration.
mike

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