[RFC] Rewriting sade(8)
Kris Moore
kris at pcbsd.org
Thu Apr 8 19:46:12 UTC 2010
On 04/08/2010 18:15, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Devin Teske<dteske at vicor.com> wrote:
>
>> Randi and I were discussion the possibility of having sysinstall
>> "remember" what you did and then able to write out a suitable
>> `install.cfg' file that could be subsequently used to perform a human-
>> less automated install with the same settings.
>>
>
In a sense that's what our back-end / front-end is doing currently.
The program flow works like thus:
Front-end starts, queries all relevant information from back-end, Disks,
Network Cards, etc,
then proceeds to walk the user through the steps gathering enough
information to perform
an installation. This gives front-end control over its own data
gathering logic from the user,
since the way I do something in a QT GUI may not work via command-line
without a mouse
or the other way around.
When we are done gathering information, the front-end writes out an
install.cfg directive
and starts the back-end processing it. The front-end then waits and
displays backend output
to the user in a sane manner, allowing user to watch whats going on.
(example)
http://trac.pcbsd.org/browser/pcbsd/trunk/pc-sysinstall/examples/pcinstall.cfg.zfs
So with this method, its pretty much doing what you describe. Every
install is a scripted
install, and if you want to do unattended installs, you can use the
front-end to generate
all the options you want, copy and/or tweak the resulting config to be
used again later.
If the backend is simply a library and not executable, then you'll end
up needing
scripting support or ways to run one implemented directly in each
front-end, which can get
messy to maintain across curses/gtk/qt/web, etc.
--
Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software
iXsystems
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