Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 12:54:53 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> To: Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years Message-ID: <200807071954.m67JsrXA030964@apollo.backplane.com> References: <20080703212100.GA16598@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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:...
:minimalist people, while a graphical installer running on top of a
:live CD, like in many Linux distributions, Ubuntu, etc. could be
:envisioned. The DragonFlyBSD installer runs on top of a live CD, this is
:the easiest way to have a full featured installer, but this requires a
:machine with sufficient RAM. Anyways all those possibilities point to
:the soundness of your propositions 1) and 2).
:
:--
:
:Michel TALON
Well, its actually more an issue of the space used on the CD, since
the base system is not compressed on the media. DragonFly doesn't try
to include all that many packages on its CD, so there is plenty of
space. Our distribution CD's run about 300MB.
There is some movement on getting a DVD distribution together and
including a lot of packages on it. I think that's the way to go if
a fully loaded dist is desired. The packages would be stored on the
DVD as binary packages (hence compressed), but everything else would
be live. As media gets larger the live portion of the distribution
becomes a smaller and smaller piece of it. It's a lot easier to enhance
and maintain a live distribution then it is a compressed one.
Actual system memory use is tiny. Remember, only dirty data eats real
memory, clean pages can simply be freed, so the the run-time footprint
is not really all that large.
And, frankly, anyone with a machine with 32MB of ram or less is not
likely to care about direct-from-CD installs. They'd more likely be
installing from a bootable USB memory stick (which runs $14 for 2G
these days), or some other media. The box might not even have a
CD drive, but it will certainly have USB ports.
So what it comes down to is having a release build that is easy to
extend and enhance, and doesn't shoot itself in the foot. You want
to be able to use the same release infrastructure for all release
targets. Compression of the base system creates lots and lots of
unnecessary headaches.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dillon@backplane.com>
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