My project wish-list for the next 12 months

[Mark Linimon]

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Scott Long wrote:

> 2.  New installer.  [... sysinstall] is fairly good at the simple
> task that it does [ ... ]

I'll put my bugmeister-hat on and simply say that query-pr suggests
otherwise.  I have not spent sufficient time examining each of the
PRs to figure out what the breakdown is between 'bugs within sysinstall'/
'unable to boot FreeBSD on hardware'/'user error' but IMHO the first
group contains more than a handful of PRs.  (the total # is 142.)

This is not to say we should abandon the KISS principle and try to
come up with some all-singing/all-dancing "thing"; in fact, the
opposite.  I'd rather we spent time on making something small and
solid which would contain enough of its own documentation to prevent
people from tearing their hair out while trying to use it.  Unlike
much of the rest of the system where we assume users have at least
some familiarity with FreeBSD (and a working browser), we have to
engineer an installer that assumes that both of those are false.

Unfortunately for me I probably will never be able to work on this
unless someone wants to pay me to work on FreeBSD full-time; too
many other things are ahead of it in my personal FreeBSD queue ...

mcl