Re: Immediate road map

[David Webster <cog@seul.org>]

On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, JF Martinez wrote:

> By the way we should consider not overburden the user with install
> questions, and have programs asking in case it is a first boot.  My 2c
> and somewhat doubt riddn idea.

I think I'd prefer to have everything set up in one go. If that means lots
of questions,"so be it". Better when they're answering questions, than
figuring it out during install. 

Perhaps the install could give the user the option: "Do you want to set up
<blah> now. If you choose 'no' you can set it up at any time by running
'config-program'. 

Also, I've just thought of the idea of a modular installer. Each set
up/config program is a 'module' that can get inserted into (or called
from) the main install script. This may be too much work, or already used,
but I thought I'd mention it.

Also, I just thought about a prog, I started to develop after a discussion
on the LDP list. It's a shell script called 'howto'. I can't remember the
full feature list, but typing howto gave you a list of all the HOWTOs,
howto -k 'keywords' searched a database for keywords. There were the
beginnings of a update function, which would connect to a URI that had a
text database file and downloaded all the files that had been last
updated.

There were some system requirements (I forget what), but have attached the
demo version I coded. It needs some work, but I think it's got the 
potentional to be a useful program. Take a look at it and let me know if
it's worth developing. (my coding ability is such that it'll be limited to
a shell script, tho.)

One other thing that was mentioned was the use of help prompts, or linux
'cookies', called from the ~/.bash_rc. Everytime the user logs in, they
get a linux tip shown to them, these can, of course, be set to various
display option (display: daily, never, every login, etc.) Perhaps even
different levels (newbie through guru). I thought this was quite a good
idea, but would require lots of people (like a mailing list full of them
;) to come up with these tips. And someone else to write a program to
display them (I'd probably be able to write a shell script to do this, but
I'm guessing a GUI would be better, as I'm probably the one of the few
linux users who does everything without X installed. AFAIK, I'm the only
person who has thought about following up on these ideas.

Just some things that may add to the user friendliness of Indy.
 
David
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howto pre-alpha prog