From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jan 27 19:40:31 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id TAA28937 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 27 Jan 1998 19:40:31 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from alpo.whistle.com (alpo.whistle.com [207.76.204.38]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA28921 for ; Tue, 27 Jan 1998 19:40:18 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from julian@whistle.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by alpo.whistle.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id TAA19371; Tue, 27 Jan 1998 19:39:00 -0800 (PST) Received: from UNKNOWN(), claiming to be "current1.whistle.com" via SMTP by alpo.whistle.com, id smtpd019367; Tue Jan 27 19:38:50 1998 Message-ID: <34CEA77B.500F9F30@whistle.com> Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 19:35:23 -0800 From: Julian Elischer Organization: Whistle Communications X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2.5-RELEASE i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" CC: Dag-Erling Coidan Sm rgrav , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /usr/src/release/sysinstall needs YOU. :-) References: <29029.885956776@time.cdrom.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk I will be doing somethign like this.. unfortunatly it will probably work best for the SLICE/DEVFS version of the system. However I need to do that before devfs can be widely used. The present tools can be used but it takes a bit too much specialised knowledge. julian > Before you do that, you might though also rewrite it to incorporate > the disk selection, slice editing and partition labeling stuff all > into one screen with "scrolling" regions like it should have been done > in the first place. If you consider the 2.0 system installer, for > example, you'll find that many people liked it because it integrated > the three in one easy-to-figure out screen. The only reason I ended > up breaking it into multiple screens was the fact that I was running > out of screen real-estate and was too lazy to implement actual > scrolling field behavior in curses, that's all. I think it could be > returned to this with a little work and the end-result would be much > easier disk configuration. The Novice installation shouldn't even > bring up that screen by default, its choices being more along the > lines of: > > Would you like to: > 1) Use the entire disk for FreeBSD. > 2) Use only unallocated space for FreeBSD. > 3) Edit the partition table manually. > > with choices 1 and 2 automagically handling all the other > configuration details as necessary based on how much space the user > has available, etc. If we drop the user into the partition editing > screen at all it should be because they either explicitly asked us to > or because we really couldn't avoid it. Most beginning users neither > know nor care about such details, they just know roughly how much disk > they want to devote to FreeBSD. > > Jordan