Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:38:03 -0600 From: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, freebsd-sysinstall@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap Message-ID: <4D35CFFB.3010302@freebsd.org>
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After some discussion with M. Warner Losh and Josh Paetzel of iX Systems, we've come up with the following roadmap for an installer for 9.0. Over the next month, we intend to try to adapt bsdinstall as the front-end for the more featureful, but lacking a terminal-compatible user interface, pc-sysinstall. This implies that the user interface and installation flow for the hybrid installer will be extremely similar to what is currently available in bsdinstall, so please continue sending feedback and bug reports on it. What will be different is the backend code, which will allow use of additional features not currently present in bsdinstall, such as ZFS installation. At the end of that month period, we'll see how far we've gotten, and plan to merge either a successful hybridization or to merge bsdinstall with its own backend, which I will continue to maintain in the interim. At this point, we plan to integrate whichever installer is merged with the release infrastructure so that it becomes the default installation environment presented on snapshot ISOs. If we have have not completed the hybrid installer at this point, work on hybridization will still continue after this. Since the interface presented to user will be extremely similar, a bsdinstall -> pc-bsdinstall transition can happen with a minimum of user astonishment, or even awareness, at any point in the future, either before or after the 9.0 release. This plan ensures that we have a minimum of three months of testing of the new installer on snapshot media before the 9.0 release, which should ensure a minimum of bugs. I would also like to point out that there are no roads in this map that end up with us having sysinstall as the default installer past the 18th of February. After 15 years of sysinstall being "greatly in need of death", it will finally be time to retire it. Thanks to Warner Losh and Josh Paetzel for excellent discussions. Please continue to send any comments on this plan, bug reports or feature requests for bsdinstall or pc-sysinstall, and suggestions for the installation process. -Nathan
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