From owner-freebsd-arch Wed Aug 30 14: 7:53 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from winston.osd.bsdi.com (winston.osd.bsdi.com [204.216.27.229]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 35D9D37B42C for ; Wed, 30 Aug 2000 14:07:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: from winston.osd.bsdi.com (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by winston.osd.bsdi.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA88180; Wed, 30 Aug 2000 14:05:02 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com) To: Poul-Henning Kamp Cc: Bill Fumerola , arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: build tools as separate distribution In-Reply-To: Message from Poul-Henning Kamp of "Wed, 30 Aug 2000 22:52:21 +0200." <22213.967668741@critter> Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 14:05:02 -0700 Message-ID: <88176.967669502@winston.osd.bsdi.com> From: Jordan Hubbard Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message