Re: Come back and graphical installer

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi Mathieu,

welcome back!

> I picked up the "Graphical installer" task. After studying the branch
> wip-installer-2, I choose to rewrite it for multiple reasons:
> 
> * I found the guile-ncurses approach too low level and think that many
>   bugs in the current installer could be avoided with a higher level
>   library.

Yeah, it's also why I didn't really continue it except for finishing
what's already there.  It's just to low-level.

I mean it can be done the low-level way, but widget libraries are a solved
problem and the "redraw it only now" stuff is seriously 1980s.

> * As suggested by Ludo[1], using a network manager seems to be a better
>   idea that calling iw, ip and other low level tools.

I agree.  Note that back then network-manager was not used in guix.

> * I prefer relying on a Guile-parted library rather than calling cfdisk
>   and again interfacing with various partioning tools.

I agree.  I've been meaning to write parted bindings for guile, but
I got side-tracked with https://github.com/daym/guile-gcc-unit which
can extract prototypes out of gcc source files (in order to automate
wrapper generation).  Now I'm motivated to pick it up again.

Maybe I should just have written the bindings manually - I would have
been done a long time ago ;-)

> Based on this, I have a first draft for a new installer here[4]. I plan
> to push it on a wip savannah branch soon. Most of the basic features are
> implemented and the last missing part it the partioning one (also the
> bigger ...).

Cool!

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