FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[Bruce Cran]

On Saturday 19 February 2011 03:04:39 Devin Teske wrote:

> There are many reasons for this, and none of them are selfish (although it
> remains possible to drum-up some selfish reason, all of the reasons behind
> our motivation are in-fact unselfish). Truth-be-told, I welcome the
> replacement of sysinstall but am very wary that ANY replacement will be
> able to exactly replicate the hardware compatibility that sysinstall
> currently enjoys. I do indeed envision a great celebration as FreeBSD-9
> bucks sysinstall but also at the same time have nightmares of receiving
> waves of calls from people having trouble (for example) "installing
> FreeBSD-9 on their AMD K6 based system, circa long-long-ago in a universe
> far-far-away." (yes, we do have data centers running that very equipment
> with uptime in the 1,000's of days).

I think bsdinstall as it currently is is simple enough that there shouldn't be 
any compatibility issues: it uses gpart for partitioning, runs tools like 
tzsetup to configure settings etc. so there's far less to go wrong than 
sysinstall's custom code which for example could crash on the "probing 
devices" screen.

-- 
Bruce Cran