No, sorry, we don't intend to do this (Anaconda was considered and
rejected long ago, in the early days of Ubuntu). Among other reasons:
* commonality with Debian, which is very valuable to us - throwing away the
existing installer would produce significant social problems for us;
* common behaviour with our server installer - an explicit design goal of
Ubiquity was to reuse code from there wherever possible, particularly in the
delicate area of partitioning where you really don't want to have to debug
problems more than once;
* our existing installer infrastructure is specifically designed for
Debian-based distributions and is very well-integrated with the distribution,
reusing source code where possible to reduce the number of bugs;
* the sheer pain involved in adapting Anaconda for Debian-based systems (yes,
I know people have done this in the past; that doesn't mean it's
straightforward or easy to keep up to date) - last I looked, Anaconda had huge
piles of Red Hat-specific dependencies;
* we already have developers with expertise in our existing installer
infrastructure, and none with expertise in Anaconda;
* the Anaconda source frankly made me feel unwell the last time I had to do
any serious work with it (when implementing Kickstart support in Ubuntu) -
instead of the simple-to-read shell startup that we have, integrated into the
system's initramfs, they have an ancient C bootstrap;
* just because Anaconda supports some things we don't support in Ubuntu,
doesn't mean that Anaconda wouldn't need serious work to avoid regressing
support for things that we *do* currently support;
In short, implementing new features in Ubiquity, where those features
are permitted by the general live CD environment at all, is likely to be
orders of magnitude easier for us than switching to a completely
different installer.
The fact that Ubiquity does not offer application selection is not a
property of Ubiquity as such; it's a property of installing from a live
CD, where individual .deb files are not available and so you have to
install by copying a live filesystem. This was an intentional design
decision and changing it is not simply a matter of dropping in a
different installer and hoping that it'll do something different. For
more flexible package selection, use d-i (indeed, we hope to be
extending the flexibility of package selection there for 9.04).
I have to admit I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to when you
mention choosing the drive boot order. Do you mean reconfiguring the
BIOS to boot from hard disk before CD-ROM, or whatever? I wasn't aware
that was even possible at the operating system level. Or do you mean
choosing where GRUB is installed? Ubiquity already offers that facility
in the Advanced... dialog on the installation summary page. If you can
clarify this, feel free to file a separate bug about just that.
While Ubiquity does have a significant number of bugs open, I don't
think that number is an accurate reflection of its current reliability,
but more of past problems.
** Changed in: ubiquity (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided => Wishlist
Assignee: (unassigned) => Colin Watson (kamion)
Status: New => Won't Fix
--
Replace Ubiquity with Anaconda?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/317725
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