From: "Matt Jezorek" <matt@bluelinux.org> To: "Jonathan Corbet" <corbet@lwn.net> Subject: Re: Common Linux Installer Editorial Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 10:11:01 -0400 To whom it may concern: After reading your article and several other complaints thru email and lots of people pushing the group to just use Anaconda or another GPL installer we would like to formally answer and maybe stop some of the questioning of our thinking process. We are not trying to take away individuality of the Distribution. The installer should be built on three different levels. Two of these are completely changeable and customizable to the Distribution using the installer. The Three layers will consist of a Functional Layer, a Text Layer, and a Graphic Layer. The Graphic Layer and Text Layer are totally customizable should the Distribution want to customize it. This way ALL istributions can be modified and seem to have there own Installation. The reason we feel that a CLI is needed is because of all the resources used in each Distribution for developing an Installer for their Product. Now the installation procedure is very important to the end users. But lets face it, that is not what people are looking for in a Distribution is a nice pretty installer. Yes they are looking for an easy one to use but mostly they are looking for functionality of the actual distribution and can they hit the ground running once the Distro is installed. By pooling resources together from the community we can create an easy to use and easy to modify installation program. This will allow resources formally used to create the various installers be used to fix bugs in the current distribution, work on new features or relax a bit. As far as anaconda and other GPL Installer we could use none of them fit the bill correctly. Anaconda all though it is under the GPL it was written completely for Red Hat. If you look in the code you will find hard coded paths that state Red Hat. So yes one could completely erase all traces of Red Hat hard coded in the code but to do so would mean to hand edit each file. Some say you could do a search and replace. Well if you do you might run into licensing problems due to the fact that Red Hat appears in the licensing text at the beginning of most files. This goes the same for most GPL installers Also Anaconda does not have clean enough separation from functionality and display. This is what we want to avoid. Also the CLI should think for itself for the most part. A lot of users who are installing Linux for the first time don't know anything about dependencies. But the Installers all Ask. So if a user selects a package and does not select a dependency the installer will ask them package FOO depends on package F002 do you want to install this package. The common answer is yes. So why ask? The CLI group is proposing to create a simple to use, modular independent, easy to configure Installation program with 100% configurability to the front end. Mostly the CLI will be a Common Backend with a sample front end that can be used or not. The reason behind this is all installers do the exact same thing. This seems like a waste of resources. Every installation program sets root password, partitions hard drives, formats partitions, and installs packages. Why not develop a standard way to address this? This installer will be built to allow any package manager to be used. If the distribution used rpm then in the configuration file they select RPM this will load the RPM Module or if they use tar then they could select TAR in configuration and that will load the TAR module. This is the exact reason why we are pushing for a modular system. Matt Jezorek