Sorry about sysinstall.

[Terry Lambert]

Nik Clayton wrote:
> This in no way prevents you from shipping your own installer CD which
> you describe in your documentation as the preferred method to install.
> 
> Then, if the customer has problems installing FreeBSd using your
> installer, and comes to the project's mailing lists for help, they'll
> be told to either contact your customer support, or use the project's
> installer which you will have shipped as part of your product.
> 
> Why is this so hard for you to understand?

It's not hard for me to understand.

It's just annoying.

About as annoying as buying a brand name laptop that a third
party has installed FreeBSD on, calling the manufacturer for
an obvious hardware problem, and then being told that before
they will even consider looking at the problem unrelated to
the OS I have installed, that I will need to "Reinstall Windows,
and if it still doesn't work, THEN we'll be willing to consider
that it might be a hardware problem".

Do you see the similarities between some hypothetical person
with a third party FreeBSD installer that installs the same
damn FreeBS plus the same damn packages, and having some well
known FreeBSD problem biting them, being told to reinstall
"using the project's installer", because *somehow*, "it *must*
be the GUI version of sysintall that's biting them on the ass"
when the battery monitor in KDE fails to work with their
laptop?

It's assinine to limit something because of a hypothetical
situation that could be engineered against anyway, but even
if it wasn't, will probably never occur.

It's very annoying to have people assume that because someone
wants to replace the installer and get paid for doing it, that
they are going to be stupid and replace libc with glibc or some
other magnificent feat of stupidity, or that the project could
not place *reasonable* restrictions on what an *installed*
FreeBSD system needs to look and function like, rather than
what an inert piece of plastic and aluminum that has yet to be
installed must look like.

How is not shipping with a disc that boots to the arcane and
frustrating torture device known as sysinstall any different
than the "FreeBSD live CD" folks who *also* do not ship disc 1
with *their* "FreeBSD" distribution?


If you are honestly concerned about differences in the code
that gets installed, that's one thing: so limit the minimum
set of software that has to be installed... what the *heck*
does that have to do with the installer that installed it,
particularly when one of the things you can insist be installed
is a "check_integrity" tool that MD5's all the non-configuration
files and probably even the template configuration files, too,
and bitches when the MD5's don't match the expected value?

Before you complain, I invite you to go through the -questions
archive, and count the number of instances where the answer to
a question was "run sysinstall and type this key sequence".

I do *not* mean instances of mentions of sysinstall, as in "you
know, sysinstall sucks" or "let's replace sysinstall" or "I
wish to God someone would replace sysinstall", I mean *genuine*
instances where sysinstall was the answer to the question, and
it imparted the information necessary to use it as the answer,
instead of vague hand-waving of "it's in the damn thing somewhere".

I also don't mean things like 50,000 foot view instructions like
"run sysinstall and install XXX", which yould just as easily be
replaced with "run your installer and install XXX".


Finally, it's really ignorant to presume that the people who
wrote a replacement installer for their distribution media
would not *also* be members of the FreeBSD community, and would
not *also* participate in the same forums, and would not *also*
answer questions related to their provided installer.


-- Terry