Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:19:49 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Cc: Mike Makonnen <mtm@wubethiopia.com>, Lothar Braun <lothar@lobraun.de>, Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years Message-ID: <200807170919.49756.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <20080705161614.O19209@fledge.watson.org> References: <784966050807021123l267aa20en39eb513c12c90ad2@mail.gmail.com> <486F8C57.9050908@wubethiopia.com> <20080705161614.O19209@fledge.watson.org>
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On Saturday 05 July 2008 11:22:09 am Robert Watson wrote: > On Sat, 5 Jul 2008, Mike Makonnen wrote: > > > The installer can already install a basic FreeBSD system (including the > > ports collection) from CD, UFS, or DOS partition. I'm currently working on > > getting FTP/HTTP/NFS installation to work. Next on my list after that is > > setting Date and Time Zone. At that stage the installer will be more or less > > feature-complete, and I can start code cleanup, getting it to work on > > additional architectures, etc. I had initially intended to include package > > installation as one of the criteria for feature-completeness, but after > > reading through this thread I've decided not to use sysinstall's package > > installation code and instead write one from scratch once I'm happy with the > > rest of the installer. > > Sounds pretty much in line with what I was looking for. However, I think I > would like to see it be a bit more complete than sysinstall in the area of > geom partition labeling (concat/strip/raid/encryption), and perhaps also ZFS > support. I realize that adds complexity a fair amount, but one of the biggest > areas of feature lack in sysinstall today is that you are basically stuck with > the original BSD partition structure and UFS, whereas we expect increasing > numbers of users to deploy ZFS. We don't have boot support currently, but > being able to set up /data as a ZFS file system would be great. Today, people > have to do an initial install on, say, a small boot partition and then > relabel/deal with the rest of the disk, boot a live CD, or worse, discover > they have to repartition, which really fails to expose some of the excellent > ease-of-use, auto-configuration, etc, features that we otherwise have in this > area. I think the best route to that is to have a separate utility for managing disk partitioning. The installer can then use that utility, and sysadmins can also use it later after the system is installed. -- John Baldwin
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