RFC: Patches to achieve bsdinstall script without dialogs

[Allan Jude]

On 2015-03-24 10:21, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote:
> It's been about a month since I sent the below RFC.  What is the best
> way to facilitate discussion about this or move towards committing these
> changes to the bsdinstall tool?
> 
> Best,
> 
> ellis
> 
> On 02/26/15 15:00, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote:
>> All,
>>
>> We use FreeBSD extensively here at Panasas, and in our day-to-day
>> software development it behooves us to have an automatic way to spin up
>> our various clients with fresh installs.  Occasionally, one of these
>> automated installs, which relies on the various components of
>> bsdinstall, bails, locks up, or otherwise malfunctions.  At that
>> juncture, checking our console logs is our best/only recourse since
>> these are head-less machines, but the existing code presumes (even in
>> the case of scripted installs) dialog will render properly.  This is
>> typically not the case in our live console or console logs for a variety
>> of reasons, and this results in our engineers wading through a lot of
>> dialog "curses-gunk" to find the relevant pieces of ascii that have made
>> their way through.
>>
>> Therefore, after positive discussion with Nathan Whitehorn about the
>> general utility of having an ascii-only install option, we have
>> implemented such and been running the attached patches for a few months
>> with success here.  These enable a somewhat friendlier ASCII output when
>> scripted installation is requested, without sacrificing (most of) the
>> niceties of progress indication and the like.  These also shouldn't
>> impact non-scripted installation, which still utilize dialogs.  With the
>> ultimate hope of these being accepted upstream and benefiting others, I
>> am first presenting them here for your comment.  These impact the
>> following files, and are named accordingly:
>>
>> usr.sbin/bsdconfig/share/common.subr
>> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/distextract/distextract.c
>> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/checksum
>> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/script
>> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit/partedit.c
>> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit/scripted.c
>> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit/partedit.h
>>
>> These are patched from 10.1 releng, as that is what we are running.  If
>> it will smooth the process towards upstreaming things, I can patch
>> against a different set of sources (i.e., CURRENT), just let me know.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> ellis
>>
>>
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> 
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These changes look ok to me.

2 main things: These would need to be based on HEAD not 10.1 in order to
be committed

And I wonder if they conflict with the FAI (Fast Automated Installer)
patches, which I think also remove the dialogs

-- 
Allan Jude

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