Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:04:00 -0500 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org> Cc: Lawrence Stewart <lstewart@freebsd.org>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Ron McDowell <rcm@fuzzwad.org>, Doug Barton <dougb@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Removal of sysinstall from HEAD and lack of a post-install configuration tool Message-ID: <201112291204.01019.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <4EFC9745.3050901@freebsd.org> References: <4EF904F2.4020109@FreeBSD.org> <201112290952.06834.jhb@freebsd.org> <4EFC9745.3050901@freebsd.org>
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On Thursday, December 29, 2011 11:37:25 am Nathan Whitehorn wrote: > On 12/29/11 06:52, John Baldwin wrote: > > On Tuesday, December 27, 2011 9:32:52 pm Lawrence Stewart wrote: > >> On 12/28/11 06:29, Doug Barton wrote: > >>> On 12/27/2011 03:48, Lawrence Stewart wrote: > >>>> On the topic of Doug's actual question, I see minimal sense in > >>>> resurrecting sysinstall in head now. I would suggest it be done much > >>>> closer to (say, 6 months before) the 10.0 release cycle, if no suitable > >>>> post-installation configuration tool has materialised. > >>> > >>> My concern about that approach is that 9.0 hasn't even been released yet > >>> and we've already seen changes that are going to make it hard to > >>> resurrect sysinstall if that's the decision we come to. Waiting another > >>> year or 2 would make it impossible. > >> > >> Which changes are you referring to? I would have thought a reverse merge > >> to undo the deletion of the sysinstall and old libdialog sources would > >> be very minimal work. We'd also probably need a few extra build system > >> changes to make sure old libdialog is perhaps statically compiled into > >> sysinstall as it would be the only in-tree consumer, but that's not hard > >> either. I may be lacking some imagination, but don't really see why it > >> would become harder the longer we wait. > > > > I think Doug is worried that the list will just get longer, and I agree. > > Bits rot faster once they aren't part of the build. It is easy to delete > > sysinstall or trim it, it is not easy to resurrect it. Personally, the one > > time I used bsdinstall recently I found it to be a bit uneven, and not really > > a step forward for a new user compared to the "standard" install mode of > > sysinstall. It's biggest win is it's ability to do more disk configurations, > > but it seemed less user-friendly in almost every other regard (and even the > > disk editor seemd less user-friendly even if it had more functionality). > > > > I'd appreciate any specific comments you might have, and especially > specific suggestions for improvements. Except from people who are old > hands at sysinstall, I've received almost universally positive comments > on the user experience. Patches would be even more appreciated, since > real life has intervened to steal most of my FreeBSD time. A way to select from available partition types (UFS, boot, swap, ZFS, etc.) rather than requiring the user to remember the 'freebsd-xxx' string would be one improvement. At the time I was more worried about getting my box up and running than taking detailed notes. :) The lack of a /compat link is another issue people have raised. The lack of a shell running on ttyv3 during the install is probably a feature I think many "advanced" users would miss. I missed having the debug output on ttyv1 as well. At work here it would be a deal-killer for my sysadmins to not have ttyv3. We use a custom installer for our boxes that I wrote as a shell script and it still does debug/verbose output on ttyv1. It doesn't start an explicit shell on ttyv3, but I have a login prompt there that they can use and I've thought about even replacing that with an explicit chroot'd shell ala sysinstall. I can't count the number of times I've used the shell on ttyv3 during installs. For new users the ability to browse the packages, etc. I think is important. It certainly was for me back when I first installed FreeBSD back in college. I don't recall seeing that option during the one install I did of 9. -- John Baldwin
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