BSD Installer as a replacement for sysinstall?

[Brooks Davis]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 08:44:45AM +0800, sam wrote:
> Travis Poppe wrote:
> 
> >Hello all,
> >
> >For quite some time I've been looking forward to seeing sysinstall go
> >and be replaced with a new system that's user interface agnostic. This
> >would allow developers to create a user interface of their choice
> >without having to muck around with the internals of the installer. It
> >seems that one of the major reasons this hasn't happened yet is simply
> >due to lack of development.
> >
> >Correct me of I'm wrong, but as far as I know, this is what BSD
> >Installer (the DragonFly team's installer) currently does. Other than
> >"political" disagreements, are there really any good reasons for us
> >not to look into using BSD Installer as a replacement for sysinstall?
> >I believe either FreeSBIE or LiveBSD (FreeBSD LiveCD distributions)
> >has already included the BSD Installer in a recent release.
> >
> >I know Scott Long has posed this idea to the list in the past. BSD
> >Installer would provide the framework needed to make bells and
> >whistles such as graphical installers and so forth much more likely in
> >the future. If there are some out there who dislike the interface
> >provided by BSD Installer, I don't think it would be too difficult to
> >write a sysinstall lookalike UI for their system.
> >
> > 
> >
> I found the idea of bsdinstaller is designed for live CD, and the 
> installation must be started in multi-user-mode, because when start up 
> bsdinstaller, its background process is listening to port 9999, and the 
> GUI program start IPC with this port, then the installation begin.
> As I have looked into the code, its IPC code does support pipe, 
> althought I haven't had it tested, but I believe it is not too hard to 
> change it into pipe, so the entire installation can be merged into 
> FreeBSD for single-usr-mode installation.

It's worth noting that the install CD is now a full live file system.  I
think it would be highly worthwhile if someone wanted to make sysinstall
unmagic so it was run as part of a multiuser boot.  The next obvious
step would be to add a hook to allow the user to select an installer
with sysinstall as the default (maybe even with a timeout).  Once you've
got that you can play with many installers easily.

-- Brooks

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