[1121] in athena10
Re: Super-Simple Installer (loller)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Wed Feb 11 16:09:10 2009
In-Reply-To: <e7b530760902101849jc4bbfcem7adf693955be5ae5@mail.gmail.com>
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Cc: Geoffrey Thomas <geofft@mit.edu>, David Sheets <dsheets@mit.edu>
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:08:00 -0500
To: debathena@mit.edu
The convention I'm familiar with is that when a dialog prompts for an
answer and highlights one, that indeed that is the default, and the
expectation is that <ENTER> will use that default.
If you aren't pre-specifying a default, then you use a different way
of displaying the question.
Perhaps others have different experience.
-Bill
On Feb 10, 2009, at 9:49 PM, David Sheets wrote:
> Sorry, I apologize for my loose words. The prompt loop "spins" around
> and asks me again. Initially, I hit <enter> several times. :-P
>
> sheets
>
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Geoffrey Thomas <geofft@mit.edu>
> wrote:
>> So, this is a question we've gotten a lot. The intention is that
>> you should
>> think about what you're answering rather than just hitting enter,
>> but a
>> recommendation is there in case you're totally confused. But the
>> behavior
>> seems to _cause_ people to get confused...
>>
>> I'm kind of surprised that it hangs rather than asking you the
>> question
>> again.
>>
>> Anyway the installer needs restructuring to offer a menu rather
>> than a
>> dichotomy of questions. We'll probably do that soon.
>>
>> Thanks for the report,
>> --
>> Geoffrey Thomas
>> for the Debathena team
>> debathena@mit.edu
>>
>> On Tue, 10 Feb 2009, David Sheets wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Using the super-simple installer, I noticed that the instructions:
>>>
>>> Answer y or n to the following prompts.
>>> The recommended choice is capitalized.
>>>
>>> are easy to miss or misinterpret. The problem comes from the default
>>> selection convention in many install scripts.
>>>
>>> I expected:
>>>
>>> Hitting <enter> would choose the default choice (it just spins --
>>> preferable to dying)
>>>
>>> It looks like you have made the answer case insensitive, though,
>>> which
>>> is good. After the spinning prompt, I got worried that maybe my "Y"
>>> had not been registered (clearly I didn't realize the instructions
>>> were so important!) so I opened the script and found "tr A-Z a-z".
>>> Yay!
>>>
>>> Anyway, it's not a huge deal: just a little weirdness you might want
>>> to look into.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> sheets
>>>
>>
