Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Sat Jul 5 15:22:10 UTC 2008
On Sat, 5 Jul 2008, Mike Makonnen wrote:
> The installer can already install a basic FreeBSD system (including the
> ports collection) from CD, UFS, or DOS partition. I'm currently working on
> getting FTP/HTTP/NFS installation to work. Next on my list after that is
> setting Date and Time Zone. At that stage the installer will be more or less
> feature-complete, and I can start code cleanup, getting it to work on
> additional architectures, etc. I had initially intended to include package
> installation as one of the criteria for feature-completeness, but after
> reading through this thread I've decided not to use sysinstall's package
> installation code and instead write one from scratch once I'm happy with the
> rest of the installer.
Sounds pretty much in line with what I was looking for. However, I think I
would like to see it be a bit more complete than sysinstall in the area of
geom partition labeling (concat/strip/raid/encryption), and perhaps also ZFS
support. I realize that adds complexity a fair amount, but one of the biggest
areas of feature lack in sysinstall today is that you are basically stuck with
the original BSD partition structure and UFS, whereas we expect increasing
numbers of users to deploy ZFS. We don't have boot support currently, but
being able to set up /data as a ZFS file system would be great. Today, people
have to do an initial install on, say, a small boot partition and then
relabel/deal with the rest of the disk, boot a live CD, or worse, discover
they have to repartition, which really fails to expose some of the excellent
ease-of-use, auto-configuration, etc, features that we otherwise have in this
area.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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