0.94 first impressions

[Craig Ringer]

> I vote that the installer PnP all the hardware. Full stop. Why would you 
> not want to do that?????

The installer may well do the hardware detection. The idea, however, is 
that the majority of the install process will happen after the machine 
has rebooted and started up off the hard disk. This way, less time is 
wasted testing with dodgy hardware, you have more control during 
install, and the actual on-CD installer can be much smaller, simpler, 
and easier to maintain.

Think of it this way: the CD's job is to make the machine bootable, but 
not much more. Partitioning, os core copy, etc. After reboot, the 
"install" continues when more packages are fetched off CD (or other 
mechanisms), more auto-detection is done, etc. There's much less 
duplication of effort to use (say) a cdrw-config tool for initial setup 
too, instead of having to essentially duplicate it's job in the installer.

It would not be at all difficult to have the hardware auto-detect happen 
quite transparently, just as if it were off the CD - just do it during 
firstboot. You could always re-run the same detection later, too, as a 
nice bonus.

I think the idea is really to simplify the "install" and move much of 
what's done in the relatively clumsy and hard to maintain install 
environment to firstboot, where it can share tools the rest of the OS 
uses, has a more complete environment available, etc.

Craig Ringer