bin/164281: bsdinstall(8): please allow sysinstall as installer option
Allen Landsidel
landsidel.allen at gmail.com
Wed Apr 23 20:27:46 UTC 2014
On 4/23/2014 14:13, dteske at FreeBSD.org wrote:
> As I continue the lay the ground-work for a bsdinstall that is superior
> to sysinstall, do I split my time amongst that task and provision a new
> task of migrating sysinstall toward resurrection with the afore-
> mentioned fixes?
I think it depends on whichever path gets us to a 'nice' installer the
quickest. The end result should be the same and I can't see how it
matters which one is used as a base. Splitting coding time between the
two just sounds silly unless the goal is to keep both alive indefinitely.
My gut says to start with sysinstall and refactor it to abstract out
interfaces to the stuff that needs replaced, then do the underlying
replacement. I only say this because getting 100% feature coverage (and
testing of those features) into bsdinstall is going to be pretty labor
intensive vs. refactoring sysinstall and leaving all the features in place.
Of course that undermines all the work you've already done on bsdinstall.
The UX is one of the things that's really terrible in bsdinstall vs.
sysinstall, and if that's libdialogs fault, I'm skeptical that this is
the right path to begin with. A simple example is the disk partitioning
interface, which seems to have taken a step backwards even in bsdinstall
itself from FreeBSD 9 to 10. The break between when you use the tab key
vs. arrow keys is obnoxious. For that matter, so is the removal of the
historical default partitioning scheme for a new linuxy "one big root"
default, but I'm getting a bit off topic and may even predate
bsdinstall. I can't remember.
> So to help answer the question of prioritization (given that demand
> still exists for sysinstall), I think the best way to guide us is a Wiki.
>
> I recommend that we develop a f.o Wiki that we can all edit to
> contain our partiticular misgiving of bsdinstall versus sysinstall.
It's worth a shot. If you want to set it up, send a link and I'll find
some time to rant into it.
> That being said... with respect to the actual PR of bringing back sysinstall
> as an option... I'm not against it. In fact, seeing that someone posted on
> the PR to check-up on me, I think it's time (once 9.3 comes out) to roll a
> new Druid disk. For those that don't know... I serve sysinstall based media
> from druidbsd.sf.net for 9.x releases (albeit I haven't cut one since 9.0).
I didn't realize that was you. I used druid for all my 9.x installs and
the only reason I responded to the PR is because there wasn't one for
10.0, and when I installed it, I was seeing red over bsdinstall all over
again. I'd forgotten about it entirely until being confronted with it
again.
> I'll make sure to cut one for 9.3 so that people wanting sysinstall can not
> only have it, but can have the one I developed for $work which has many
> MANY enhancements -- *cough* including the ability to install from a USB
> thumb drive *cough*. (smiles)
Very nice.
I'm in a fully virtualized environment, so once I get a base system set
up, I just clone it repeatedly and make changes to that. This means I
rarely am reminded of the user-unfriendly fiasco that installing FreeBSD
has become. Sysinstall was of course nice for other reasons, not least
of which was a quick way to look for ports without digging through the
freebsd.org web interface or make find+grep etc.
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