[arch-releng] text-file automated install

[David Campbell]

Hi everyone, with the new addition of AIF I decided to start listening
to this mailing list and am finding some of the discussion very
interesting even if some of the technical bits are a little over my
head. The text file installation idea sounds particularly interesting
and I also like the idea of having bash helper scripts or even some
kind of ncurses interface to help generate the text files. This would
make installation much more smooth for a lot of users and make making
custom installs very easy(being able to hit enter and come back when
the job is done is awesome). If things were done well, hundreds of
linux distros might even dry up overnight as people realized rather
than making a million distros more or less from scratch or hacking
away at other distros, everyone can work on a common framework for
easily creating specilized installs with specific application
profiles. I think It may be a good idea to throw up some of the AIF
documentation on the arch wiki and provide details useful to those
less experienced with coding. If people come to realize how silly much
of the distro ecology is right now, efforts may be shifted away from
spending lots of effort to create slight variations on others' work
and toward things such as upstream development and improvement of
framworks like AIF. Instead of a web site existing which someone goes
to to find out what the right distro is for him (
e.g.http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/ ), he would run a script (or
web interface thing) or ncurses app on an install disk and it would
create the right distro for him.

-David Campbell