my thoughts on FreeBSD

Johnson David DavidJohnson at Siemens.com
Mon Mar 1 13:31:47 PST 2004


On Monday 01 March 2004 01:08 pm, Scott I. Remick wrote:

> 3) Old cruft. Apparently a lot of people are too scared of the whole
> ncurses/sysinstall beast to dare revamping it. It works, and it's
> tried-and-tested. It's easier and safer to make minor modifications
> to support new versions than to overhaul it.
>
> I wouldn't mind a GUI option, if there were enough people to maintain
> it, but it'd need to only be an option (leaving the current ncurses
> install or some other equivalently-easy text-based install for the
> die-hards). And then you'd have to make sure there were people around
> enough to support 2 separate install scripts (unless a text-based one
> could be automatically generated from the GUI one somehow, using
> templates).

The sysinstall implementation started out as a quick-n-dirty hack, but 
unfortunately it lived on. I've been pondering the solution to this for 
a few months now. Frankly I don't see the absolute need for a GUI 
installer, but it's certainly a nice thing to have. But a text mode 
installer is essential. So the first step is to get a well designed 
text mode installer.

The libh project (sysinstall replacement) is dead. I've have some ideas 
on this topic, but it's a bit more than I can do on my own. However, 
the only way stuff gets done in FreeBSD is for someone to get an itch 
and do it, so I'll probably end up doing something soon.

David


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