Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 02:36:04 -0500 From: Donn Miller <dmmiller@cvzoom.net> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> Cc: Eric Jones <ejon@colltech.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: sysinstall: is it really at the end of its lifecycle? Message-ID: <3855F364.E66EC87B@cvzoom.net> References: <2177.945155945@zippy.cdrom.com>
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"Jordan K. Hubbard" wrote: > All true, I'm afraid. All I can say is that efforts to revive the > effort to replace sysinstall are underway and we're even trying to > throw some money-shaped darts at the problem in hopes that we'll hit > something. I'm cautiously pessimistic, so we'll see. :) As far as the successor to sysinstall goes, I think it would be nice to have both a console version and an X version, with some X tookit such as Lesstif or Qt, or Tcl/Tk. It could be a lot like RedHat's "linuxconf", where you can use it as both an installer or system administration tool. Not that I'm in love with RedHat's method of doing things, but I think it would be nice to keep sysinstall (or whatever it'd be called) as an all-in-one tool for adding packages or for first-time installs. Maybe we could call it "sysconfig", in honor of the old /etc/sysconfig file that was superceded bt /etc/rc.conf. I saw in CUBFM (the newsgroup) where a couple of people wanted to do a GUI menu-based interfaced to the kernel configuration (as opposed to editing a file by hand). I don't think this would be too hard at all, but I wondered what the experienced FreeBSD users thought of this idea? I was fiddling around with NetBSD-current i386 on this same machine, and it looks really raw compared to FreeBSD. No offense, but they don't even have anything as nice as sysinstall yet. On top of that, there's no utility like we have (userconfig) to edit device parameters before the boot procedes. As a result, if more than one ISA device is attached to the same IRQ, you'll get a kernel panic on boot-up. Of course, I realize NetBSD is more focused on being multi-platform than we, but there's no reason they can't "borrow" some ideas from us, such as userconfig boot editor or sysinstall. In return, we could borrow some of their code for our SPARC port. I think we should keep the lines open between us and NetBSD/OpenBSD, so that we can exchange some ideas more freely. - Donn To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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