Date: 13 Feb 1998 17:18:29 +0100 From: dag-erli@ifi.uio.no (Dag-Erling Coidan Smørgrav) To: freebsd-install@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Questions to the gurus :) Message-ID: <xzplnvf7a22.fsf@hrotti.ifi.uio.no>
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OK, as some of you may have noticed, I've more or less volunteered to work on a new installation tool. I thought I might benefit from some advice from my elders, so here goes: On the functional side, I'm thinking about a system of .inf files which specify the name, location and size of each distribution, as well as the long description, dependencies etc. (hmmm... perhaps we could even use the pkg format for the distributions...) With some minor work, this could mean that a single boot floppy could be used to install any version of FreeBSD. If the floppy is older than the version you want to install, you can just download the .inf file... I'm also thinking about moving more of the dirty work out of the installer and into backends. I haven't RTFS very closely, but I did notice that ftp is implemented directly into sysinstall. How much space is there available on the boot floppy? Is it enough for fetch? Of course these things are difficult to compute because of crunch... I also have some concerns about the interface. Previous versions of sysinstall are rumoured to work well with screen readers, and that's a feature I feel I should keep, but I have no idea of how these thingumabobs work. Same goes for support for serial consoles of varying arcanity (arcaneness? sp?) - I think sysinstall should support as many terminals as possible (headless How concerned should I be about screen size? Can I safely assume no resizing will take place? Can I safely assume that the screen will be at least 60 columns wide, and at least 15 or 20 lines tall? Is libdialog a big win, or is it OK to code directly against libncurses? More questions will come when I think of them... -- DES (dag-erli@ifi.uio.no) (btw, how d'ya like my new minimalistic sig?) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-install" in the body of the message
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