[nycbug-talk] another. . .?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Apr 26, 2005, at 1:10 AM, George R. wrote:

> http://www.pcbsd.org/
>
> I find this all a bit confusing. . .
>
> What makes an installer 'hard'?  It doesn't look like Windows?  It 
> seems *that* is the standard by which all installers are judged.

Technically?  Not too many things... There are some bootstrapping 
issues to an installer.. you don't get to rely on a large and nicely 
configured environment being ready, you might have to fit on a single 
floppy disk, or be able to load yourself from a series of floppy disks, 
etc.

The social/psychological issues are much more of a factor.  It's 
especially hard to find somebody who wants to write an installer.  
Anyone capable of writing one doesn't need it themselves, so the 
motivation has to come from somewhere else.  Once you get that far, 
testing installers in general is a real pain in the ass, and OS 
installers are just about the worst (in user space, anyway).

> I wouldn't doubt the intentions of the creators of PC-BSD, but are we 
> really out to conquer the desktops of those who threw out their 
> typewriters last year?  With no sarcasm, I think that OS X has 
> reasonably done that, in that it's probably the most intuitive desktop 
> system around.
>
> And if the BSDs are too difficult for certain sysadmins, they should 
> probably find another line of work, preferably something without any 
> remotely technical content.

Seriously..  The FreeBSD installation process is cake.  It's basically 
self-documenting.  I think it's great, I wouldn't change a thing other 
than making it easy to do via PXE.

-bob