Ubuntu
debian-installer package

drop d-i in favor of a good graphical installer, anaconda for example

Bug #21568 reported by Alexander van Loon on 2005-09-13

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	debian-installer (Ubuntu)	Invalid	Medium	Colin Watson

Bug Description

To my surprise, d-i, the Debian installer, is still used in the Breezy preview.
Now that Ubuntu is becoming a mature distro, I expected that d-i would be
ditched in favor of a good graphical installer. Fedora and other distro's have
been using the anaconda installer for ages, why doesn't Ubuntu use that? It's a
lot more user friendly, and it doesn't scare new users like d-i does.

Revision history for this message

Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote on 2005-09-13:

No, d-i does an awful lot of good stuff for us that would be a lot of work to
re-hack into anaconda (which, in my personal opinion, is really dreadful and
hard-to-maintain code under the fancy covers, even if you discount the
non-trivial effort of porting it to a Debian-based distribution and maintaining
that port on an ongoing basis); this has been discussed extensively and we've
decided to stay where we are. We are looking at graphical options built on top
of d-i; a live CD-based installer will probably be the primary presentation in
future. We'd hoped to get that ready for Breezy; it didn't quite make it, but it
should be there for Breezy+1.

In any case, Bugzilla is not the appropriate place for discussions of this type.
Use the mailing lists instead.

Revision history for this message

Alexander van Loon (avanloon) wrote on 2005-09-13:

Whoa, a reply 5 minutes? Quite fast.

Good to hear that a graphical installer on top of d-i is in the works. Sorry for
not using the mailing list, I thought that I could post feature requests in
Bugzilla. Didn't know that I had to use the mailing lists for that. Which one
should I have used, ubuntu-devel?

Revision history for this message

Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote on 2005-09-13:

(In reply to comment #2)
> Good to hear that a graphical installer on top of d-i is in the works. Sorry for
> not using the mailing list, I thought that I could post feature requests in
> Bugzilla.

Specific feature requests are welcome in Bugzilla, but major shakeups like
switching to an entirely new installer require much more discussion than
Bugzilla is suited to.

> Didn't know that I had to use the mailing lists for that. Which one
> should I have used, ubuntu-devel?

Yes - although it's been discussed there several times before, and some of those
discussions fed into the specification work we did at the last conference on
UbuntuExpress (the projected live CD graphical installer).