RFC: Patches to achieve bsdinstall script without dialogs

[Ellis H. Wilson III]

It's been about a month since I sent the below RFC.  What is the best 
way to facilitate discussion about this or move towards committing these 
changes to the bsdinstall tool?

Best,

ellis

On 02/26/15 15:00, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote:
> All,
>
> We use FreeBSD extensively here at Panasas, and in our day-to-day
> software development it behooves us to have an automatic way to spin up
> our various clients with fresh installs.  Occasionally, one of these
> automated installs, which relies on the various components of
> bsdinstall, bails, locks up, or otherwise malfunctions.  At that
> juncture, checking our console logs is our best/only recourse since
> these are head-less machines, but the existing code presumes (even in
> the case of scripted installs) dialog will render properly.  This is
> typically not the case in our live console or console logs for a variety
> of reasons, and this results in our engineers wading through a lot of
> dialog "curses-gunk" to find the relevant pieces of ascii that have made
> their way through.
>
> Therefore, after positive discussion with Nathan Whitehorn about the
> general utility of having an ascii-only install option, we have
> implemented such and been running the attached patches for a few months
> with success here.  These enable a somewhat friendlier ASCII output when
> scripted installation is requested, without sacrificing (most of) the
> niceties of progress indication and the like.  These also shouldn't
> impact non-scripted installation, which still utilize dialogs.  With the
> ultimate hope of these being accepted upstream and benefiting others, I
> am first presenting them here for your comment.  These impact the
> following files, and are named accordingly:
>
> usr.sbin/bsdconfig/share/common.subr
> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/distextract/distextract.c
> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/checksum
> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/script
> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit/partedit.c
> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit/scripted.c
> usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit/partedit.h
>
> These are patched from 10.1 releng, as that is what we are running.  If
> it will smooth the process towards upstreaming things, I can patch
> against a different set of sources (i.e., CURRENT), just let me know.
>
> Best,
>
> ellis
>
>
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