On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Alok Aggarwal<Alok.Aggarwal at sun.com> wrote: > Currently the Caiman architecture supports two types > of installers - a LiveCD based GUI and AI. Each of these installation > environments are different in that > one is a desktop based environment while the other is > not. As a result, they are both built on a different > set of packages with AI being built on a significantly > smaller set. > > As we provide more installation environments in the future > (text based interactive install, a media based AI and possibly a network > based text install), I think there are a couple of high order issues that > need to be sorted out. > > a) What kind of an image should these new installers > (text, media based AI) be based on? Since both these > installers are not going to offer a desktop installation > environment, does it make sense to base them on the > same set of packages as AI? I think it would be a > reasonable starting point.
Turning that around, why would they be different? As I see it, AI is just an interactive install with all he questions already answered so they get skipped. The way I see an interactive install is as a dialogue for the user to create the desired profile as they go. And one of the questions for an "interactive" install (including from a LiveCD) might be "give me a location to get a manifest from and I'll install according to that". (Or even an "invoke AI" option to make it search.) > b) Assuming some of these installers get delivered as > part of the same AI image, how should the selection > between which installer to use be made? The two obvious > choices are to provide them via the GRUB menu or as a > separate menu item that comes up as part of boot (kind of > like the keyboard and language selection menu in the > current LiveCD installer). I think one of the underlying > requirement here is to allow this to be scriptable. Also, > a consistent user experience on both sparc and x86 would > be nice. A separate menu items seems better on both counts. How do you define scriptable? This goes back to the AI discussion we had a while back about how to invoke the auto-installer. It's the same image. On sparc, a regular boot goes interactive; adding the install flag kicks off AI. On x86, you get a grub menu with the same choices. (For network based installs, you get the network server to set the default option in the list if you want full automation.) Thanks, -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
