Request for review/testing: switching the default installer

[John Baldwin]

On Monday, February 28, 2011 9:49:07 am Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> BSDinstall has acquired at this point its final form (prior to a future 
> merge with pc-sysinstall), and I believe is ready to replace sysinstall 
> on the 9.0 snapshot ISOs. Barring any objections, I would like to pull 
> this switch 2 weeks from today, on the 14th of March.
> 
> A patch to the release infrastructure code can be found here (make 
> release must be run with Makefile.bsdinstall using this patch to get 
> non-sysinstall media):
> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-release.diff

Hmm, does your installed world include the pre-built mergemaster database? 
That should really be preserved.

It happens here in the old release Makefile:

# Install the system into the various distributions.
release.2:
        cd ${.CURDIR}/.. && ${CROSSMAKE} distrib-dirs DESTDIR=${RD}/trees/base
        cd ${.CURDIR}/.. && ${CROSSMAKE} ${WORLD_FLAGS} distributeworld \
            DISTDIR=${RD}/trees
        sh ${.CURDIR}/scripts/mm-mtree.sh -F "${CROSSENV}" -D 
"${RD}/trees/base"
        touch ${.TARGET}

I use a one-line patch locally to bootstrap etcupdate into the worlds I 
package up at work via a similar one-liner.

> Test ISOs for amd64 and i386 can be found here:
> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-amd64-20110222.iso.bz2
> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-i386-20110224.iso.bz2
> 
> More recent test ISOs, as well as ones for other architectures, may be 
> available at:
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/BSDInstall
> 
> Bug reports would be very appreciated at this time. There are three 
> known bugs currently, which will be fixed soon, so please don't report 
> these: error reporting is not graceful if there are no writable disks in 
> the system, you must select at least one optional component, and the doc 
> build is not currently connected to the releases.
> 
> There are some changes to the distribution format involved in this 
> patch, which are outlined below, and about which I would also appreciate 
> feedback:
> - The src tree is not split up into pieces (e.g. ssbin) as with sysinstall

I would at least like to have src split up into two pieces:

1) would be equivalent of sbase and ssys of old distributions, so you could 
choose to just install kernel sources along with the top-level Makefile bits 
to build kernels.  I commonly install this subset on production machines so I 
can install a custom kernel in a pinch.

2) would be everything else in the source tree.

> - Distfiles are not chunked, but are single xz-compressed archives
> - There is only one CD image produced, which is always also a live CD
> - There are no packages on this CD. There is about 100 MB of free space 
> on it right now, so it might make sense to keep it this way and to make 
> a separate packages CD/DVD. Removing packages from disc1 also makes 
> cross-building release ISOs possible.

Packages were always optional on disc1 anyway, but moving them completely off 
is probably ok.

-- 
John Baldwin