Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 06:15:24 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freefall.cdrom.com> To: core@FreeBSD.org Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: TODO list for 2.0.5 Message-ID: <2890.800716524@freefall.cdrom.com>
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Rod has been pestering me about this for a few days, so as I have a
quick moment to breath right now (doing a make in another window :)
I'll oblige him and the rest of you who may also be wondering.
First off, I just want to make it clear that the first and foremost
thing holding up 2.0.5 right at the moment is sysinstall, and for that
I make no excuses. It's taken me significantly longer than planned
(several weeks) to write this from scratch, and writing it from
scratch was more or less mandated by the write-only install code we
did for 2.0R and its failure in the face of the new "slice" code. In
any case, we're almost out of the woods with that and I hope to have
it fully functional in as short a time as possible (days, not weeks).
However, there are a number of other things that need doing for 2.0.5
so without further ado, here's the list. All of these things are
considered _mandatory_ for 2.0.5 by me and others, so if nobody else
steps forward for a task then I'll do it myself, but it *will* get
done before 2.0.5R goes out the door so bear in mind that your
volunteering for one or more of these tasks will have a significant
(positive) impact on 2.0.5's ship date!
Task: HW.DOC
Assigned: Gary Palmer, Justin Gibbs
Status: Open. They need help with this.
Detail:
A document needs to be generated that documents the following
3 things:
1. All the options in the GENERIC kernel need to be documented in
terms of what the user's hardware should be configured to do in
order to match GENERIC's view of the world. This could be done as
a fairly simple table, with the device names down the left and
their port/irq/drq/memory address information in columns.
2. All the options in LINT that work and aren't in GENERIC need to
be listed as "add-on" options readily available to the user but
simply not enabled by default. This includes things like the
PS/2 mouse or Video Spigot driver. User's should be made aware
of it when their hardware IS supported but simply not turned on
in GENERIC for one reason or another (which should probably also
be explained in each case). Point the user at the Kernel configuration
section (6) of the FAQ for more details.
3. Troubleshooting. This should document things like the -c flag and
how/when to use it. It should also point out potential conflict
problems that we've experienced (bogus PCI configuration, cylinder
translation bogons, etc) and how to deal with them.
4. Bonus section (optional): Prototype hardware configurations at the
$1K, $2K, $3K and $5K price-points (or perhaps classified by type,
e.g. workstation, router, enterprise server, development box, etc.
I don't really care). People are always asking us "what should I buy
to run FreeBSD?" and we should do our best to answer them, if we can,
even if it's with "these prices are highly changable and for guideline
purposes ONLY!" stamped all over it. If you can provide 4-5 "popular
combo configurations" then I'd say people would be more than pleased.
-*-
Task: README
Assigned: Gary Palmer, Justin Gibbs
Status: Open. He needs help with this.
Detail:
A general README file, along the lines of the old one, needs to be
written. I can supply the marketspeak ("Welcome to FreeBSD 2.0.5!
Now curing cancer and turning water into wine at an FTP site near
you!") but I need someone to accumulate more raw material as to what
we've DONE for 2.0.5 and try to put into a more coherent description
of what 2.0.5 IS. This could conceivably be split into 2 documents -
a general README describing FreeBSD and 2.0.5 Release Notes; I really
don't care at this stage. :-)
-*-
Task: INSTALL
Assigned: Jordan
Status: Open. Not even started yet.
Detail:
A general step-by-step guide for using sysinstall needs to be written.
I'm probably stuck with doing this alone, unless someone wants to jump
aboard with sysinstall in -current and start documenting the various
screens, and I wouldn't fight that at all! :-) If each screen were
fairly fully documented (see the *.hlp files referenced in
/usr/src/release/sysinstall/menus.c) then the installation guide
could be fairly short! As it was, I was going to make a long
installation guide and lots of short screen help files, which
strikes me as less optimal.
-*-
Task: FAQ
Assigned: The FreeBSD Doc Project
Status: Open.
Detail:
The FAQ needs to be updated for 2.0.5 and generally made more relevant
to the bits we're about to release. This is John Fieber's coordination
task, but I just thought I'd mention it here as something that needs
to be gone over before I stick it on the boot floppy.
-*-
Task: sysinstall
Assigned: Jordan
Status: In Progress
Detail:
As I said in the opening paragraph, I'm working on this now to the
exclusion of almost all else, but I felt it would be useful to note
it in the list. I still have some outstanding problems with sysinstall
which I may NOT get to if someone else doesn't jump in here, and those
are probably worth noting:
1. DOS batch files for creating *dist copies on disk or
floppy. When you've got an unsupported CDROM (say an IDE
CDROM, which is a rather disgustingly popular item these
days) you are left with little recourse but to boot DOS,
which does have drivers for your CDROM, and copy the
stuff onto lots of floppies or try and find some hard disk
space and copy the relevant files there. The problem has
always been a great lack of clarity as to just exactly which
_are_ the relevant files. We all know that you need a
bindist at the minimum, and that a bindist consists of many
bin.* files, accompanied by extract.sh and do_cksum.sh
scripts, but the poor new user has no way of knowing that.
Some nice DOS batch file(s) which I could invoke from
Walnut Creek's DOS viewer program would go a long way towards
making it less necessary to know such things.
You'd just select the appropriate option, wait for it to copy
the files or prompt you to insert floppies until your arm fell
off, and then read the last "what to do from here" instructions
before booting the boot floppy.
2. Multi-lingual support. This is actually something I
*really want* to get into sysinstall, given that I've got
a whole team put together for doing the translations and it
would be a damn shame to waste the opportunity, but I'm a little
worried by the fact that the simple "usage.hlp" file I did as
an initial test does NOT display properly in syscons! I'm doing
all I think need to be done to set the font and (in the case of
Russian) screenmap up correctly, but it's not working. If
someone could take a look at lang.c and system.c in sysinstall
and tell me what I'm doing wrong, I'd sure appreciate it!
-*-
Task: packages
Assigned: Satoshi & Team
Status: In Progress
Detail:
I need a collection of packages to put in the CDROM at some point.
I also need someone to go through LEGAL and make sure that nothing's
slipped through.
I know that Satoshi is already working flat-out on this, and has some
testing in progress, I only note it for completeness.
-*-
That pretty much sums it up, actually. The tree seems quite stable
right now, and there are no really bad bugs that I know about that
need fixing. There are a number of features I could think of wanting,
but we're in code freeze and it's not about wanted features it's about
show-stoppers at this point.
Jordan
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