Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

[Mike Makonnen]

soralx at cydem.org wrote:
>> Hear, hear!  To be honest, this is the only bit about the current
>> sysinstall that I really dislike:  the fact that it can be used for
>> post-installation configuration and package installation.  This causes
>> no end of trouble for newbies, who seem to view sysinstall as "The One
>> True System Admin Tool" and try to use it for configuring/installing
>> everything.  Too many times, on various BSD forums, I've had to walk
>> people through cleaning up /etc/rc.conf and showing them how to
>> correctly install/configure things (using standard FreeBSD tools),
>> since they used sysinstall for everything.
> 
> That may be true, but sysinstall did help me do basic, essentical
> configuration of my very first installed system, and a few installs after
> that (until I learned about /etc/rc.conf et al). And I never regarded it as
> The One True Sysadmin Tool, because I did not use Linux distros, thus never
> got used to their ways. It's just that the simple configuration menu really
> helped me to get a useful system running in a few minutes (though menu items
> certainly could make use of more verbose descriptions). And then I could
> play with the working system and learn ways to configure it.
> 
> So, IMHO, a basic curses system configuration utility is still needed, and
> should be run after sysinstall or it should tell the user how to run it
> (maybe in motd, or sysinstall itself?).
> 

Yes, I agree that such a tool is useful, but it does not belong in the 
installer. In fact, the BSD Installer framework can be used here also to 
separate the implementation details from the user interface.

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
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