sysinstall as a post-install tool

[Lawrence Stewart]

[switching to freebsd-sysinstall@ which I'm no subscribed to, please 
keep me CC'ed]

On 01/04/12 11:27, Marcel Moolenaar wrote:
>
> On Jan 3, 2012, at 3:33 PM, Eitan Adler wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> In the the recent sysinstall thread there seems to be general agreement that
>> having a post-install configuration tool is a good thing. Until such a
>> tool is written I think it would be a good idea to use sysinstall for
>> this purpose.  I am willing to do the work to restore sysinstall and
>> maintain it as a post-install tool until a new one is written.
>
> I though sade was created for that purpose, because sysinstall was too
> much tied to the installation process. If sysinstall comes back, sade
> definitely has to go:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> r161060 | netchild | 2006-08-07 16:35:49 -0700 (Mon, 07 Aug 2006) | 9 lines
>
> Say welcome to 'sade', the SysAdmins Disk Editor. It's the fdisk and disklabel part
> of sysinstall. So sysinstall may retire now, we have the important non-install part
> of it covered.
>
> ATM it doesn't understand GEOM stuff (like mirror, stripe, raid, ...), but patches
> to change this and to clean it up internally are more than welcome.
>
> Submitted by:   mami at nyitolap.hu
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> In general I think it's a bad idea to revive sysinstall. It doesn't
> function appropriately on most architectures that FreeBSD supports
> and it's definitely the opposite of what we've been working towards
> for at least the last 5 years.

In the sysinstall removal thread, Ron (CC'ed) suggested he might be 
interested in getting involved with writing a post installation config 
script which leverages bsdinstall's sh code where possible, but is 
separate and stand alone. Ron's extensive sysadmin background would be 
very useful in developing such a tool, so it seems silly not to take the 
offer and run with it to see where we end up.

Ron, are you still interested in this project? What help and/or support 
do you need to get things moving?

Eitan, as discussed briefly on IRC, I suspect the amount of work 
required to revive sysinstall and do all the hacking to make it do what 
you suggest would be in the same ballpark as syncing up with Ron and 
having a crack at a shell script based on a set of dialogs a la 
bsdinstaller to achieve the same goal.

I know you said you didn't want to write a new tool, so if getting 
involved with the above doesn't take your fancy, perhaps just waiting to 
see what comes of the effort to write said tool would be prudent.

Cheers,
Lawrence