From owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Mar 8 12:44:21 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 16BFB16A4CE for ; Mon, 8 Mar 2004 12:44:21 -0800 (PST) Received: from zeus.acuson.com (ac17860.acuson.com [157.226.71.80]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0C46643D46 for ; Mon, 8 Mar 2004 12:44:21 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from DavidJohnson@Siemens.com) Received: from mvaexch02.acuson.com ([157.226.230.209]:4629) by zeus.acuson.com with esmtp (Exim 4.14) id 1B0RbX-0000PA-6C; Mon, 08 Mar 2004 12:44:03 -0800 Received: by mvaexch02.acuson.com with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2657.72) id ; Mon, 8 Mar 2004 12:35:19 -0800 Received: from dhcp-46-107.acuson.com ([157.226.46.107]) by mvaexch01.acuson.com with SMTP (Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.5.2657.72) id GFNWF51R; Mon, 8 Mar 2004 12:34:04 -0800 From: Johnson David To: Matthew Seaman Organization: Siemens Medical Systems Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2004 12:42:01 -0800 User-Agent: KMail/1.6 References: <20040308201508.GA8114@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20040308201508.GA8114@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200403081242.01939.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> X-Scanner: exiscan for exim4 (http://duncanthrax.net/exiscan/) *1B0RbX-0000PA-6C*5OEhniYBDDM* cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Installation - More user friendly X-BeenThere: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: FreeBSD Evangelism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2004 20:44:21 -0000 On Monday 08 March 2004 12:15 pm, Matthew Seaman wrote: > Now this I think will be a very productive way forward. It's much > easier to write a program to do one particular thing well, and > integrate it into a collection of similar programs, than it is to > throw away everything and rewrite the whole lot from scratch. > Problem is, sysinstall isn't really set up for piecemeal replacement, > and while sysinstall may have been the canonical 'throwaway hack > pressed into production' actually throwing it away means there has to > be a complete full-featured replacement ready to slot in instead. While sysinstall itself isn't suitable for piecemeal replacement, the idea behind it is. Consider the Slackware installer. It essentially is a series of shell scripts throwing up dialog screens. (well it does assume that you've already partitioned the harddrive, but that's another story). sysinstall tries to do too much. You can split up its functionality into separate utilities and not lose a thing. Of course you would need to get all of these utilities completed before you could replace it. But these utilities would be useful in and of themselves in the meantime. David