BSDInstall: I want the bikeshed painted plaid

[Garrett Cooper]

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 1:51 PM, John Hixson <jhixson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> I spent a bunch of time looking at pc-sysinstall before starting to work
>> on this. The major problem for non-x86 systems is that it heavily assumes
>> that your disks are either MBR+bsdlabel or GPT. If you have anything
>> different (APM, VTOC8, or even a raw bsdlabel or MBR installation on x86),
>> it breaks in strange and fascinating ways due to a random mixture of if
>> (scheme == MBR) else and if (scheme == GPT) else in the backend. Some of
>> these are easily fixed, but it looked quite difficult to root out all of the
>> places this assumption is made, not to mention teaching it about various
>> styles of boot code, that the same partitioning scheme may need to be set up
>> different ways on different architectures, etc. txt-sysinstall also
>> segfaults when you try to run it on powerpc at the moment, though that is
>> likely a simple bug and I didn't look into it in detail.
>>
>> What I intended with bsdinstall is to have something simple, flexible, and
>> easily maintained that works immediately on all platforms and will be ready
>> for 9.0 for sure. If pc-sysinstall materializes before then, or after then,
>> and people like it better, I'm more than happy to get out of the way; this
>> is the reason the wiki page is titled "Stopgap Installer". In the interim, I
>> hoped to at least start laying out the hammer and nails next to sysinstall's
>> coffin.
>> -Nathan
>>
>
> I would be more than happy to help out with making pc-sysinstall work on
> non-x86 systems, however I don't have access to any. Do any of you have
> hardware that could possibly be used by interested parties? I'm sure all the
> work that's gone into bsdinstall could be used in pc-sysinstall or vice
> versa.

I have a powerpc mac and I might be able to scrounge up another
powerbook. Not sure if the powerbook is DoA or not as I don't have the
adapter anymore...
Thanks,
-Garrett