Removal of sysinstall from HEAD and lack of a post-install configuration tool

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 12/29/11 06:52, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 27, 2011 9:32:52 pm Lawrence Stewart wrote:
>> On 12/28/11 06:29, Doug Barton wrote:
>>> On 12/27/2011 03:48, Lawrence Stewart wrote:
>>>> On the topic of Doug's actual question, I see minimal sense in
>>>> resurrecting sysinstall in head now. I would suggest it be done much
>>>> closer to (say, 6 months before) the 10.0 release cycle, if no suitable
>>>> post-installation configuration tool has materialised.
>>>
>>> My concern about that approach is that 9.0 hasn't even been released yet
>>> and we've already seen changes that are going to make it hard to
>>> resurrect sysinstall if that's the decision we come to. Waiting another
>>> year or 2 would make it impossible.
>>
>> Which changes are you referring to? I would have thought a reverse merge
>> to undo the deletion of the sysinstall and old libdialog sources would
>> be very minimal work. We'd also probably need a few extra build system
>> changes to make sure old libdialog is perhaps statically compiled into
>> sysinstall as it would be the only in-tree consumer, but that's not hard
>> either. I may be lacking some imagination, but don't really see why it
>> would become harder the longer we wait.
>
> I think Doug is worried that the list will just get longer, and I agree.
> Bits rot faster once they aren't part of the build.  It is easy to delete
> sysinstall or trim it, it is not easy to resurrect it.  Personally, the one
> time I used bsdinstall recently I found it to be a bit uneven, and not really
> a step forward for a new user compared to the "standard" install mode of
> sysinstall.  It's biggest win is it's ability to do more disk configurations,
> but it seemed less user-friendly in almost every other regard (and even the
> disk editor seemd less user-friendly even if it had more functionality).
>

I'd appreciate any specific comments you might have, and especially 
specific suggestions for improvements. Except from people who are old 
hands at sysinstall, I've received almost universally positive comments 
on the user experience. Patches would be even more appreciated, since 
real life has intervened to steal most of my FreeBSD time.
-Nathan