Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years
Mike Makonnen
mtm at wubethiopia.com
Sun Jul 6 07:27:02 UTC 2008
Robert Watson wrote:
> 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.
I agree absolutely. I should have said ".... more or less
feature-complete for a 1.0 release".
Cheers.
--
Mike Makonnen | GPG-KEY: http://people.freebsd.org/~mtm/mtm.asc
mtm @ FreeBSD.Org | AC7B 5672 2D11 F4D0 EBF8 5279 5359 2B82 7CD4 1F55
FreeBSD | http://www.freebsd.org
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