FreeBSD installers and future direction

[Alfred Perlstein]

On 5/27/13 6:53 PM, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> On 05/27/13 20:40, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>> On 5/27/13 2:23 PM, Bruce Cran wrote:
>>> On 27/05/2013 21:28, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>>> On 5/27/13 11:40 AM, Bruce Cran wrote:
>>>>> Yes.
>>>> Is this a joke?
>>>
>>> It probably /was/ too short a reply. Personally I think there should 
>>> be a single UI and scripting interface across all platforms. We 
>>> should try and get pc-sysinstall running on all of them first in 
>>> case there's some problem that means it can't be done, in which case 
>>> we'd need to use a different backend.
>>>
>>
>> There are just going to be certain platforms that make it EASY to do 
>> cool things.  We should embrace that!  That's why there are different 
>> platforms!
>>
>> Some are great for low power, others are great for graphics, cpu 
>> power, gpu, networking etc.
>>
>> If we always go for the lowest common denominator then we are 
>> crippling all the platforms for no one's benefit.  Even if something 
>> CAN be done, if it is very difficult, or just never happening, then 
>> we can't limit everyone's experience based on the more difficult 
>> and/or resource strapped platforms.
>>
>> It's just not good business.
>
> Yes, and all of this cuts both ways: pc-sysinstall has no wireless 
> setup support, for instance. Right now we support what we support 
> because it is the most feature-complete thing we have, not just on 
> tier-2 platforms but also on x86.
>
> To bring this discussion back to the ground, the fact is that we lack 
> an installer that has both internal support for ZFS and a UI. One of 
> the reasons for this is that making a good expressive UI for ZFS is a 
> non-trivial undertaking given its enormous flexibility. The bsdinstall 
> partition editor has been written to be extensible for this, and 
> several people have started writing code to do it, but no one ended up 
> having time to finish. Probably a reasonable thing to do is to start 
> with supporting only a minimal set of features. If anyone felt like 
> actually writing this code, I'm sure it would be appreciated by all 
> and be more productive than email exchanges.
> -Nathan

I'm sure if there was a list of reasonable things, such as wireless then 
pc-sysinstall could be augmented.  This is the first I've heard of 
that.  All the other complaints have been based on portability.

Is that all that is required now, wireless?



-Alfred

-Alfred