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Date:      Wed, 30 Aug 2000 14:05:02 -0700
From:      Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com>
To:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
Cc:        Bill Fumerola <billf@chimesnet.com>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: build tools as separate distribution 
Message-ID:  <88176.967669502@winston.osd.bsdi.com>
In-Reply-To: Message from Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>  of "Wed, 30 Aug 2000 22:52:21 %2B0200." <22213.967668741@critter> 

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> As one of the original perpetrators and in fact the one who laid
> the foundations of sysinstall and "make release" where they lie to

Hmmm.  Some historical liberties are being taken here since, actually,
I believe Rod Grimes deserves a good deal of this title - he's the one
who wrote much of the beginnings of what we now call release/Makefile
today.

Also, let's not forget Gary Palmer, who wrote a number of the config
screens for sysinstall, he and I handling the "UI side" of sysinstall
with most of my solo hacking being aimed at the menu infrastructure,
device handling, etc.

Unless I miss my guess, your guilt in this affair lies primarily with
libdisk, another abstraction in dire need of a rewrite*. :-)

Nonetheless, no matter how many weighty software development tomes one
quotes, the fact remains: Sysinstall is NOT extensible, easily
scriptable (I know, I wrote that bit too) or well suited for doing
mass-production of FreeBSD boxes in a hardware vendor environment.
Nor is it sufficiently graphical to please folks who are used to the
Caldera or Red Hat installers, much less Windows or Solaris, which
means that the only people who really *like* it are the folks in the
very middle.  The hardcore production folks hate it for not allowing
them to more easily automate their prooduction lines and the novice
users hate it because it's not a click-and-drool method of installing
FreeBSD.  Sysinstall preaches to the already-converted, and that's
essentially the same problem all the other *BSD installers have.

- Jordan

* Things like region coalesce, collapse and resize would be very
  nice wishlist items for libdisk MkII.


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