Re: [ks] thoughts on kickstart

[R P Herrold <herrold owlriver com>]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, rpjday wrote:

>   given that i've finished my reading of the kickstart docs, and
> having previously messed with it to some extent, i'm going to wax
> verbose, then i'll shut the heck up.  
<snip>
> and that's why a lot of this raging inconsistency needs to be addressed
> now.  as it stands now, the aesthetics of that file are a mess, and
> will make future improvements that much harder.   now would be a
> good time to clean it up.

Preface:
IANAHNBARHE -- I am not and have never been a Red Hat employee 

All wonderful points, and indeed worthy goals -- but a couple 
of observations:
  1.  The installed base is there, and has to be transitioned 
in -- any efforts should consider a compatability mode, with a 
deprecated form still funcitonal.

  2.  A lot of good ideas pass the mailing lists, but do not 
get summarized, and broken into easily applied 'bite-sized' 
pieces.  Linus T takes a lot of heat for wanting small 
patches, over of the Linux kernel side, but it is a proven 
method to avoid getting list in a patch.  If it cannot be 
broken down into a screen's worth of code, it is probably not 
atomic enough.  Think Bugzilla to keep track of those good 
ideas.

  3.  Bugzilla is your best friend here -- preface the Subject 
line with 'RFE:' and select Enhancement in the dropdown, and 
it has a good change of being applied when the package 
maintainer is in a design phase.

  4.  There is nothing like working patches -- and Bugzilla is 
set up to accept uploads of patched -- what a happy 
circumstance.

-- Russ herrold