Google Summer of Code

[Daniel Mróz]

On Saturday 03 of March 2007 20:03:41 Adam Gołębiowski wrote:
> > > areq's rescuecd is the best one, but I realize it may be the best one
> > > for me, not necessary for everyone. Having a modern, gui installer
> > > wouldn't hurt.
> > Wouldn't, but I think we should fix existing text mode installer and add
> > some new features to it (like multimachine, fully automated network
> > installation).
> And end up with an installer that almost noone would use - experienced
> users will prefer rescuecd, while less experienced would rather choose
> another distro, which has a better installer. I know of a few people
> whose choice was based on how easy is to install given distro.
Small steps would be better I think. We must have text mode installer, that's 
for sure. When this will be accomplished, then we can think about GUI 
installer, which can be even build on top of existing one or use 
it's... "modules".
But let's get back to that new feature above for a moment. What would you say 
about that for a project? I mean, if we have a few raw machines with the same 
or similar hardware configuration (like a cluster) and we want to install PLD 
on all of them. They're booted from TFTP with our new installer that opens 
some TCP port. On a single, already running machine we define all the 
parameters of the installation (disk partitioning, RAIDs, packages to 
install, initial system configuration; we could do this even on per machine 
basis), connect to "slaves" and monitor the entire process done in parallel 
on all of those machines. Thanks to this we could manage that multimachine 
installation from a single "master" application (i.e. GUI), without 
connecting keyboards and displays to the "slaves". In one window we could 
have informations like what each of the "slaves" is doing now, are there any 
errors, how much time (not exact of course) is left to finish and so on.

> > Because it's one more package that is absolutely not needed for proper
> > system operation and because it looks like a spyware ;)  Besides, it is a
> > great false-positive generator. For example, I'm installing many packages
> > just to check what are they doing and is it useful for me. If not, I
> > simply remove them. I'm sure that many other users are doing the same.
> Then you won't install it. Others will. Sure it's not going to give us
> correct numbers, but at least we could have rough statistics about
> packages' popularity (like whether gnome or desktop is preferred).
>
> Debian has popcon [1], and they don't complain about their statistics
> being inadequate. I know we are not as big as Debian is, but still, such
> data could be useful and for sure, it won't hurt to have them.
OK, but there's one more thing that bothers me. Is it not too simple? Such 
application can be done in less than 100 lines of code in Python, including 
error handling. That's about two hours of coding without final tests. How 
long this Summer of Code will take?


Regards
Beorn

-- 
Daniel 'Beorn' Mróz <beorn w alpha.pl>    http://127.0.0.1/beorn
[GIT d s:- a-@ C++++ UL++++$ P+ L++++ E--- W+ N+++ o? K- w---]
[O- M- V!  PS+ PE++ Y+ PGP++ t- 5  X R !tv b+ DI D++ G++ e h*]
[                          r++  y+                           ]