boot banner project

[Scott Long]

Several reasons.  The first is the most important:

No one has stepped forward and 'done it'.

Now, I personally have a lot of reservations about it.  I
fundamentally don't like the architecture; their claim of
divorcing the UI from the model isn't really true.  What
they've done is create a lowest-common-denominator UI framework
that must be invoked directly from the model.  Well, I guess
that 'directly' isn't quite right, since it's redirected through
an RPC mechanism.  But anyways, instead of having the UI (and
thus the User) direct the flow and control the model, the model
directs the flow and periodically exchanges input with the user.
In other words, it still has much of the architectural limitations
of sysinstall, but with generic UI elements instead of just
ncurses.

They also haven't shown how to solve the hard problems, mainly
partitioning the disk, working in a multi-boot environment,
divorcing the 'install the bits' phase from the 'configure
the bits' phase, etc.  So, it's a nice proof of concept at
this point, and it works well for very simple situations, but
I don't consider it a sysinstall replacement yet.  If the
point of having a new installer is to improve the existing
state of the art and attract new users, not having multi-boot
and partitioning is a serious limitation.  Every time I
evagelise FreeBSD to someone new, the second question they
ask me is whether they can dual boot with it.  It is, however,
good at exactly what it was designed for, mainly taking your
existing FreeBSD installation and morphing it into DFly ;-)

Scott

John Sconiers wrote:
> Is there a reason why we haven't adopted the bsdinstaller? 
> (www.bsdinstaller.org)
> 
> On 4/29/05, Michael Nottebrock <lofi at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>>On Friday, 29. April 2005 10:02, /dev/null wrote:
>>
>>>"And that's everyone likes in BSD's"
>>> WOW! Were you elected Official Spokesperson for everyone? ;)
>>
>>Everybody has an expert opinion on painting bikesheds.
>>
>>--
>>   ,_,   | Michael Nottebrock               | lofi at freebsd.org
>> (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve     | http://www.freebsd.org
>>   \u/   | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
>>
>>
>>
> 
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