Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Rob Lytle wrote:

> My depressing analysis- YMMV. I've used FreeBSD since 1998.

The good news is that there are no less than three in-progress sysinstall 
replacements.  At least two have been posted about recently with test ISOs for 
7.0.  And there are at least a couple of other variations floating around, 
such as the PC-BSD installer.  So I think we can expect to see non-trivial 
progress here in the next year.  My primary concern about some of these 
replacement installer projects is that they've placed a strong focus on making 
them graphical -- I actually couldn't care less about GUIs (and I think they 
actually hurt my configurations, since I use serial consoles a lot), but what 
I do want is a very tight and efficient install process, which I feel 
sysinstall does badly on (not just for the reasons you specify).

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge

>
> 1..Installing the packages off of the menu on the 3 CDROMs is an incredibly
> tedious miserable process.  I had to switch out the CD's around 40 times.
> If you don't believe me, just mark a whole bunch of random packages after
> obtaining the 7.0 release CD's, ad then install.  Its frustrating and almost
> like Windows, except its a bit faster as replacing CD's is faster than
> reboots.
>
> 2.  When installing any given package, if a dependency is already there ,
> the  package aborts and then goes though some loop where you have to press
> OK half a dozen times.  Thats insane.
>
> I think the CD switching problem would be to install all the packages at
> once from CD1, then CD2, then CD3.  As for the second case, I don't know
> enough about the infrastructure to suggest any thing except to perhaps
> comment that code in its entirety or put in  switch to bypass already
> installed dependencies.
>
> I wish I knew more about  your infrastructure to fix this myself.  Is it
> written in Python?  Thats the only language I'm not so rusty at.  I've
> programmed in 5 languages, but that was long ago.  I'm old.  But someone who
> knows the system could probably fix it fast.  I think this is such an
> inherent infrastructure problem that has existed so long that a bug report
> would be futile.
>
> Food for thought.  Thanks,
>
> Rob
>
>
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