FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[Bruce Cran]

On Mon, 2011-02-21 at 16:12 -0600, Josh Paetzel wrote:

> pc-sysinstall has been used as the PC-BSD installer for quite a while now, and 
> has done a lot of installs on a lot of different hardware platforms.  I'll 
> wager that the compatibility of the shell command gpart is a better bet than 
> the "stick your thumbs in you ears and yell nananana while you scribble 1's 
> and 0's to a disk and voila, there's a disklabel" approach that sysinstall 
> uses.

I wish that was true: unfortunately I tried and failed to create a ZFS
installation with pc-sysinstall, and I get a few worrying error messages
even with UFS while it repartitions the disk - people have been
reporting it creating unbootable systems.  gpart might be more
compatible, but I don't think parsing the output of tools like as fdisk,
diskinfo and dmesg is.

The concerns about GPT, ZFS, gmirror etc. in sysinstall could all be
resolved in a couple of days by ripping out the existing partitioning
code and replacing it with ae@'s new version of sade
from /user/ae/usr.sbin/sade .  However since the future is pc-sysinstall
I've now shifted my work to improving the Qt front-end.

-- 
Bruce Cran