Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 13:18 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Chris Lumens (clumens at redhat.com) said: 
> > >  - downloads updates in parallel too
> > 
> > Package updates?
> 
> 1) Given that it's using yum, downloading multiple things in parallel
> would need to be fixed there.
> 2) If it means downloading packages in the background while it does
> other tasks, given that package selection is the final task in the
> current workflow, it would require reordering the workflow to be
> beneficial. (Which becomes a memory usage tradeoff.)

I believe the Ubuntu installer under discussion is the live installer.
Like Fedora, there is no package selection involved there. Ubuntu gains
considerable simplicity by having a separate installer app for live
images and making that its default installer - I'm no expert, but I
think the 'advanced' installer you can use for network installs and
custom package selection and LVM and RAID and all that stuff is
essentially Debian's installer, and is a completely different experience
to the Ubuntu installer.

So, we could follow this same path and make an anaconda-live which would
be a considerably simplified subset of anaconda and could gain in
parallelization and simplification and stuff, but we'd be duplicating a
lot of effort then and we'd have no handy 'upstream' installer to fall
back on for more complex cases, as Ubuntu does.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net