From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Sun May 26 23:27:33 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [8.8.178.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BE600821 for ; Sun, 26 May 2013 23:27:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from erdgeist@erdgeist.org) Received: from elektropost.org (elektropost.org [217.13.206.130]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 35B3D211 for ; Sun, 26 May 2013 23:27:32 +0000 (UTC) Received: (qmail 33238 invoked from network); 26 May 2013 23:27:27 -0000 Received: from elektropost.org (HELO elektropost.org) (erdgeist@erdgeist.org) by elektropost.org with CAMELLIA256-SHA encrypted SMTP; 26 May 2013 23:27:27 -0000 Message-ID: <51A29A5F.7010106@erdgeist.org> Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 01:27:27 +0200 From: Dirk Engling User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130509 Thunderbird/17.0.6 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Devin Teske Subject: Re: FreeBSD installers and future direction References: <51A0DC3F.9030301@cran.org.uk> <51A1025A.2020607@cran.org.uk> <51A14445.4060305@freebsd.org> <51A15EDF.6050600@erdgeist.org> <13CA24D6AB415D428143D44749F57D7201F5B2E7@ltcfiswmsgmb26> In-Reply-To: <13CA24D6AB415D428143D44749F57D7201F5B2E7@ltcfiswmsgmb26> X-Enigmail-Version: 1.5.1 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Cc: FreeBSD Hackers , "Teske, Devin" , Nathan Whitehorn X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 26 May 2013 23:27:33 -0000 On 26.05.13 05:42, Teske, Devin wrote: > I chose 100% sh for bsdconfig because of a few good reasons… First, the partedit tool makes heavy use of libgeom and the structs returned from that lib, so I've rather wondered why for some parts C was preferred, and not the other way around. Still, thanks for pointing all that out, but I rather wanted to look at the installer from another angle, as it is supposed to provide everyone from FreeBSD novices to experts with a comfortable way to do things the right way and yet be flexible enough to avoid abandoning the tool once the requirements differ. So I wonder if there has ever been a best practices document on how to "properly" set up zpools, when to advice the user against using zfs at all, whether it makes sense to use geli on the boot device, when it is better to have multiple zpools and only encrypt the data pool(s). Maybe the installer should be advocating concepts like manageBE, pre-setting noexec-flags on /var, setting some default quotas. The second part, of course, is to find visual concepts on how the user is guided through the default and expert bsdinstall/bsdconfig screens to cover the most common scenarios and still offer enough options. All this doesn't need a developer but a bunch of veteran FreeBSD admins, a wiki and a lot of bike sheds to paint. If there's no such document yet, I propose editing one in the wiki. erdgeist