On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 8:18 AM, Jeremy C. Reed <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost> wrote: > Any plan on thoughts on communication from the backend (installer) to the > frontend (user interface)? > > In other words, if something fails in the real installation, can it fall > back to reprompting the user for different choices? Yes. I can't remember if I went through this on the application page, or if I just thought of it, but I was thinking that the config file itself could contain an option for whether to just report an error or to open up the front end to resolve any issues. The way it could work is that, if the config file exists, but is not complete, the front end just asks the user for anything that isn't there. You could also have an option to verify before installing. For normal distributions, this would be equivalent to the current last-chance message of "Are you sure you want to continue?" You could just bypass that when doing a repeatable installation. One thing I'm not sure of is whether to have the front end and back end in the same executable or not. Doing so would allow easy switching between the two when errors arise. Having them separate would allow modularity though. I think that the best option would be to have them be separate, and make sysinst itself just a shell script that runs both. That way, even the shell script is configurable. It might run the back end in "check" mode to see if it can fully install, and then run the front end it it can't. > > Or is this for creating a known setup, testing, and then reusing that > installation configuration later (like identical systems in an office)? Yes! > > Also it sounds like NetBSD and the community can provide ready-to-use > configuration files too. And users could bypass the frontend altogether? Yes! Sounds pretty cool, huh? I haven't thought about pulling the configuration file from the net, as Volker mentioned, but that's certainly a good idea (though it should probably be delayed until later). Perhaps the front end will start up, look for the config file on the installation medium (I'll have to learn more about how exactly to do that...), and then prompt the user if it's not found. The user could start from scratch, or specify where the file could be found. Also, I'd like to apologize to you (Jeremy) and Alistair. I just sent my replies directly to you instead of to the list, so you will get duplicates. I can usually post to mailing lists directly by replying to a post on them, so I don't know what's happening...