why BSDs got no love

[Randi Harper]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 7:48 AM, Julian H. Stacey <jhs at berklix.com> wrote:
> Randi Harper wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 6:50 AM, Julian H. Stacey <jhs at berklix.com> wrote:
>> > Peer Schaefer <peer.schaefer at hamburg.de> wrote:
>> >
>> >> BTW, the Debian installer consists (a) of a modular, frontend agnostic
>> >> backend, and (b) different frontend "plugins", e.g. a curses-frontend or
>> >> a X/GTK+-frontend. This is a modular and very elegant approach (but
>> >> surely difficult to implement).
>> >
>> > Perhaps the way to go is a common table of target defaults eg
>> >        /usr/src/usr.sbin/sysinstall/install.cfg
>> > Which could then be edited by all of
>> >        Front end CLI           (*)
>> >        Front end curses GUI    (*)
>> >                (*)             Maybe these 2 alternatives should be
>> >                                the first question the installer asks ?
>> >        Front end X11 GUI (for later after main install complete
>> >                                - Shudder, Not that I'd use it, but someone
>> >                                  would probably want to write one).
>> >        vi - for editing, & writing back to new boot media,
>> >                to auto install on multiple identical new machines.
>>
>>
>> I would sooner stab myself in the face.
>
> Not obvious at all which your personal revulsion applies to
>        CLI ? ncurses ? install.cfg ?, X11 ?, vi ?


All of the above. The bug list for sysinstall is not small. Even if
this wasn't the case, I'm not even going to work on introducing that
many options and obfuscating the code that much more. The mere thought
of the rewrite involved in adding that kind of support makes my head
feel like the knife is already in place.

The only support I've been *thinking* about adding is a simple CLI in
addition to the existing libdialog (ncurses) install. This would still
be a not insignificant modification, but there are issues that make
using a libdialog based installer problematic on some displays. It's a
fun idea to kick around, but it's not a priority.

I don't even know what you mean by vi, but it sounds confusing and
unnecessary. This is what install.cfg is for - so you can define the
parameters of an installation beforehand.


-- randi