Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years
John Baldwin
jhb at freebsd.org
Thu Jul 17 14:25:17 UTC 2008
On Saturday 05 July 2008 11:22:09 am 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 think the best route to that is to have a separate utility for managing disk
partitioning. The installer can then use that utility, and sysadmins can
also use it later after the system is installed.
--
John Baldwin
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