On 03.04.2013 23:36, Alan McKinnon wrote:
The reason I say Gentoo shouldn't worry about installers is that the typical person installing Gentoo already knows about chroots. Someone who doesn't is unlikely to consider Gentoo at all (unless they are looking to rice, but we long since moved past that).
As for me, the Gentoo installation process is really much easier than that of some installer-based distros. Regardless of knowledge of what chroot is, if one follows the (very well written and detailed) installation docs, he'd get Gentoo installed with far less effort than trying to make out what all these fancy buttons and menus mean in a graphical installer. And from an already-user-of-another-distro point of view, it's even more attractive that he can install and tune Gentoo from his already-installed linux, not even wasting time writing CDs, booting and stuff.
And the guys around here confirmed that they hadn't had problems with chroot :)
This idea will of course not be popular, I'll be told I'm trying to be elitist, and so the search for the perfect installer will continue unabated
Well, an installer certainly would find its users. But none is perfect, and writing another (imperfect) one exclusively for Gentoo is sort of wasting time. A "true" Gentoo way IMO would be a selection of installers on the installation medium ;-) But AFAICT it is this idea that wouldn't be popular, rather than leaving no-installer at all. Regarding elitism, can the absence of an installer be considered elite? :) I'd rather call 'elite' e.g. the OpenSUSE installer (a claim for elite, at least). Probably it's time for me to agree with the 'Gentoo is what it is' pattern I had argued against a month ago. =)
-- Best wishes, Yuri K. Shatroff
