Proposal for new `post-install userland configuration utility'

[Garrett Cooper]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 6:46 AM, Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Jul 2010 09:18:46 -0700
> Garrett Cooper <yanegomi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes, that's the idea that I had in mind for sysinstall, because it
>> does a lot more than it needs to today.
>
> Has anyone done a survey to see if users think it does too much, or
> that they only use X % of its functionality? I think we need to be
> careful before ripping features out. Debian and Slackware both seem to
> have installers with the same feature set as sysinstall, so we need to
> watch out in case we put less experienced users off using FreeBSD by
> ending up with a very basic system they'll have trouble getting started
> with.

    Not really (I would argue that sysinstall has a lot more features,
and complexity). The typical install flow formula in many Linux
distros I've run into is:

[Setup Keyboard Layout ->] [Check Media ->] Welcome  -> Setup disks
(Partition / configure LVM) -> Setup Bootloader -> Setup Timezone ->
Setup Users (password for root, username and password for
unprivileged, but superuser capable) [-> Setup Install Media, i.e.
network, CD, etc] [-> Configure Packages to install] -> Install

    This was the case for Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, RH, RHEL, and
Ubuntu (of course the step varies, but not by much). Don't remember
about Slackware (it's been ages since I tried using it...).

    IIRC OpenSolaris follows the above formula rather closely (but
with ZFS, not LVM).

    I think that OpenBSD follows a similar formula. Can't speak for NetBSD.

    Most of the above distros have fuzzy, happy utilities for
configuring stuff in the distro default DE/WM by choice, or some
wrapper script infrastructure for doing things. So I don't think that
introducing a simple utility would be too much of a departure from
other OSes, but I do think that it would be a departure from folks who
are used to FreeBSD's sysinstall, or are migrating from older versions
of FreeBSD to newer ones in an install.

    So... it's ultimately a thought that I was tossing out because
Randi suggested it, but if there isn't enough pull or interest in the
utility, I'll concentrate my efforts elsewhere.

Thanks,
-Garrett