Hmm... why?

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On May 23, 2004, at 11:46 PM, <timh at tjhawkins.com> wrote:

> why does freebsd need a new installer? Why not allow the current 
> installer "sysinstall" to just become user friendly..edit it and add 
> new things to it... possilby even adding a graphical interface that 
> works with it. It's all possible and correct me if I'm wrong--wouldn't 
> it be less work? If sysinstall was just more userfriendly it would 
> work very well.

Go give it a try.  Once you're done wrestling with the code for awhile 
in an effort to "just make it more user friendly", you can answer your 
own question.

>  As for porting a  Linux installer to FreeBSD... I do not recommend 
> it. there will be alot of conflict about the GPL vs. BSD licenses and 
> we all know what kind of war that starts. I personally think freebsd 
> should have its own installer under its own license.

I think you sell the FreeBSD community a bit short.  The issue is not 
GPL vs BSD, and if there were a good, generic installation framework 
that could be adapted to FreeBSD and was under the GPL, I don't think 
people would blink twice at it.  The problem with the Linux installers 
isn't that they're GPL'd, it's that they're written to be very specific 
to the distribution they're installing and make a lot of assumptions 
about low-level Linux-specific partitioning methods and such.

--
Jordan K. Hubbard
Engineering Manager, BSD technology group
Apple Computer