Date: Sun, 19 Jan 1997 22:30:13 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Keith Leonard <keithl@wakko.gil.net> Cc: chat@freebsd.org, config@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Cursing the sky (was: Commerical applications ...) Message-ID: <17176.853741813@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 19 Jan 1997 17:07:02 EST." <Pine.LNX.3.95.970119163151.12852A-100000@wakko.gil.net>
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> Freebsd should have installation options for a straight forward simple 'I > got a 14" vga monitor with a keyboard and mouse' setup. Let the user > choose X setup, developers setup, users setup without the 1x10^65 > questions he has no idea or desire (at the moment) to know. They'll > eventually want to know but if knowing Unix is a prerequisite (sp?) for > even getting it up and running then many(vast majority) will fall by the > wayside in utter frustration. Hey, you write it and I'll take it! :-) I never claimed to have the best install, or even to be the best person to write one (I'm not, really, I hate installation tools! :-). I simply did it because nobody else would or wanted to, and I hated the thought of FreeBSD being without a reasonable installation. Now, unfortunately, having done the first install, I've now got all kinds of *ideas* about how the second one should look and how to avoid the various pitfalls in the current installation's approach and yadda yadda yadda, and so I talk about them all the time and How Good It's Gonna Be When We Get There and I probably scare anyone with an idea for a "rival implementation" away. That's kind of too bad, if so, because all I and the other install hackers *really* have at this particular stage is the following motley assortment: o /usr/src/lib/libdisk for abstracting away the disk interface (which is good - it makes the installer a lot easier). o /usr/src/release/sysinstall, which is an aging pile of C that, like so many things in this category, was already obsolete before it was finished. Can you say "stop-gap technology" boys and girls? :-) o A couple of TCL packages for putting up dialogs and talking to libdisk. This was to be the nucleus of the new "setup" program to replace sysinstall but progress on that halted when we all realized that libdialog and curses really sucked for writing the "GUI" and we needed to go off and deal with that part of the problem first. I think that was about 3 or 4 months ago. :-) Maybe I'll get my act together soon and get things moving on that front again, but I'll say here and now that if someone ELSE has a brilliant shining picture in their head and the will to execute it in C, C++ and/or TCL (no PERL please - we haven't room on the boot floppy for that approach!), I'd love to talk to them. A fresh set of eyes on FreeBSD's installation and configuration framework would be interesting too. Damn, a hand-off worked so well with Satoshi and the ports collection, why can't I seem to do it again with the installation and configuration tools? :-) Jordan
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