Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

[Matthew Dillon]

:...
:minimalist people, while a graphical installer running on top of a 
:live CD, like in many Linux distributions, Ubuntu, etc. could be
:envisioned. The DragonFlyBSD installer runs on top of a live CD, this is
:the easiest way to have a full featured installer, but this requires a
:machine with sufficient RAM. Anyways all those possibilities point to
:the soundness of your propositions 1) and 2).
:
:-- 
:
:Michel TALON

    Well, its actually more an issue of the space used on the CD, since
    the base system is not compressed on the media.  DragonFly doesn't try
    to include all that many packages on its CD, so there is plenty of
    space.  Our distribution CD's run about 300MB.

    There is some movement on getting a DVD distribution together and
    including a lot of packages on it.  I think that's the way to go if
    a fully loaded dist is desired.  The packages would be stored on the
    DVD as binary packages (hence compressed), but everything else would
    be live.  As media gets larger the live portion of the distribution
    becomes a smaller and smaller piece of it.  It's a lot easier to enhance
    and maintain a live distribution then it is a compressed one.

    Actual system memory use is tiny.  Remember, only dirty data eats real
    memory, clean pages can simply be freed, so the the run-time footprint
    is not really all that large.

    And, frankly, anyone with a machine with 32MB of ram or less is not
    likely to care about direct-from-CD installs.  They'd more likely be
    installing from a bootable USB memory stick (which runs $14 for 2G
    these days), or some other media.  The box might not even have a
    CD drive, but it will certainly have USB ports.

    So what it comes down to is having a release build that is easy to
    extend and enhance, and doesn't shoot itself in the foot.  You want
    to be able to use the same release infrastructure for all release
    targets.  Compression of the base system creates lots and lots of
    unnecessary headaches.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>