Why is sysinstall considered end-of-life?

[Niek]

On Tuesday 09 January 2007 08:21, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

> >
> > 3) The largest complaint about sysinstall is that it's not graphical.  The
> > problem is that a graphical installation program has some -severe-
> > constraints on it.  First, it has to work in ALL instances.  That means,
> > 640x480x16 colors VGA screen.  You have a lot of people out there
> > installing on systems that have, for example, monitors with inadequate
> > horizontal/vertical frequency ranges and very capabable video cards,
> > unless you force the X-server to use the original VGA resolution, it's
> > going to overdrive those monitors and the user is going to see a black
> > screen when the installation program comes up.  And the only way FreeBSD
> > is going to get a graphical anything is by using Xorg, and FreeBSD does
> > not maintain that distribution - so we are now dependent on the Xorg
> > group writing their code with no bugs for our installation program to work.
> >
While I admit that sysinstall could be polished at the rough edges, I vote for a non-graphical installer for server aimed installations. I see no practical reason to have an X based installer for a server installation at all, with all the heavy stuff that's necessary for it. Please leave that to the desktop oriented BSD distributions. I wonder how many server admins would like to see an X based installer. 

I rather would propose a clear distinction (communicated to new users) between desktop aimed distributions and server based ones, where the first category would be the current distribution of FreeBSD, with a nice graphical installer, a window manager, drivers for most sound, usb, wireless and video devices, and desktop applications added to it. I am not familiar with desktopBSD and Freesbie, but I can imagine that these are already working in that direction. (I am using FreeBSD-current as a desktop OS on a laptop, but it required some days of tweaking to get sound, touchpad & usb mouse, 1280x800 resolution and wireless networking running.)  

Niek