Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

[Lothar Braun]

Robert Watson wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Lothar Braun wrote:
> 
>> Robert Watson wrote:
>>
>>> 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).
>>
>> Hmm, how should a tight and efficient installation process look like 
>> in your opinion? And what are the other points that are bad in 
>> systinstall?
> 
> For me, it's really about minimizing the time to get to a generic 
> install from a CD or DVD.  Most of the time, I don't do a lot of 
> customization during the install -- I configure machines using DHCP, I 
> add most packages later, and I tend to use default disk layouts since my 
> servers don't multi-boot and the defaults currently seem "reasonable".
> 
> I don't like being asked many more questions than whether or not to 
> enable sshd, and what to set the root password to.  This means that I 
> find our current distributions menu a bit inefficient (I don't want 
> sub-menus, I just want checkboxes), and that the inconsistency in the 
> handling of the space/enter/tab/cursor keys across different libdialog 
> interfaces in the install is awkward.  The current generic and express 
> installs seem to capture a lot of my desire, in that I can get a box 
> installed in <5m including actual time to write out the file systems, 
> which is great.  I really don't want to lose this with a new installer :-).

What about having two utilities for the installation process? Something 
like a very small (non-gui/non-X) version of "sysinstall" that just 
installs a base system and only has the functionality to

- partition/label a disk
- configure the network (if needed for installation)
- install the base system (or parts of it)
- install a boot manager

and a second utility "sysconf" that provides the other stuff like post 
installation system configuration (sshd, mouse), installing packages, 
etc. The second utility could have an X-based GUI without disturbing the 
installation process of serial console users or people that don't like X 
on their machines.

Would that be a good idea?

Best regards,
   Lothar