drakx - Mageia Installer and base platform for many utilities

	Commit message (Expand)	Author	Age	Files	Lines
*	i can compile slang and newt with dietlibc now	Guillaume Cottenceau	2001-05-14	1	-0/+1142

a little DrakX history: june 1999: i start rewriting redhat's install in perl, partly for the fun of it. I'm still working for the army 5 july 1999: i start full time job at mandrakesoft. But we don't have many computers and i must share the accounting computer with Merieme who is working half-time. No test machine (i test on others box, and destroyed Jacques partitions once), guess how it slows things down? august 1999: at last computers, even test one first DrakX version which can install things, very very rough september 1999: a friend of mine help me 2 weeks on DrakX relayed by Francois november 1999: first released version of DrakX (goldpack). Not really stable yet. january 2000: 7.0 is out, with a DrakX quite stable july 2000: dams starts working on draknet mid-october -> mid-january 2000: gc rewrites the stage1 to win every kb we can -> size divided by 7 (!) for cdrom The DrakX team is also doing a lot of other things: - drakxtools - urpmi, early MandrakeUpdate, early rpmdrake... - Mandrake Control Center (new DrakConf) - packages maintenance/enhancing (esp. ghostscript, 3D-wrappers, lilo) - fixing core packages to make them installable - scoring packages, sorting them, flagging them... (compssList, rpmsrate) - reading/answering cooker and other MLs - helping non-perl gurus :) That doesn't give much. Me being the one more working on plain DrakX. It gives 2 people working for 1.5 years. IMO it isn't ``spending an enormous amount of resources''. And what do you mean by ``compared to the code base size''??? DrakX is currently around 28K lines, which is big IMO. You can compare it with linuxconf which is 170K lines. I think the achievement of DrakX is comparable (a 6 times code size win from dumb C++ to expressive perl is normal imo). Also it seems like we don't have the same understanding of the word "maintenance". DrakX functionalities have evolved *a lot* since the beginning: - hardware detection, configuration, debugging, work-arounding (multi-kernel installs...) - making things prettier - more bitmaps - "advanced" button - syslinux graphical boot - making it work with latest versions of software (eg: switching to rpm4) - finding out the best way to use rpmlib - multi-cd - draknet: configuring every piece of stupid protocols - diskdrake: raid, loopback, LVM, resizing, checking stupid users entry - XFdrake: multi-mice, multi-heads, 3D-accel - porting to axp/sparc/ppc (with Stew's help) - always more i18n - keeping things small - .cz format - moving to .png - getFile on demand from mdkinst for ramdisk installs [...] > You don't believe the books ? Count yourself; see the man/months spent > in 'pure' developoment in drakX, and the resources put in mantainance > of the code base; as far as i know, your count should confirm what the > books says; more probabily, you will discover that our numbers are > even worse. if you count enhancements, adding features... in maintenance, i confirm the numbers, and find them quite normal. if you only count bug fixing, the time would be much shorter (around 30%).