svn commit: r223897 - in head: release usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 07/17/11 07:42, Vadim Goncharov wrote:
> Hi Nathan Whitehorn!
>
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:54:39 -0500; Nathan Whitehorn wrote about 'Re: svn commit: r223897 - in head: release usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts':
>
>
>> as well as letting
>> people try out the operating system and expanding the range of system
>> functionality available to the installer. This takes space. Some of that
>> space is at the expense of other things, but I personally believe that
>> trade-off is very much worth while.
> This shouldn't trade off really. Is that stuff using geom_uzip(4) to save
> space? This is just as simple as doing mkuzip -v mfs_root.md and tweaking
> loader.conf for vfs.root.mountfrom, mfsroot_name and module loading.

The installation disks are also straight ISO9660 now. There is no 
mdroot, so none of this is possible.

>
>> the release scripts and the installer. Presumably, the release will also
>> include a second CD (or DVD) full of packages, which will contain the
>> full handbook.
> That's also a variant, but the commit says about requirement to have network,
> not CD2, or am I missing something?

There isn't a CD2 anymore. Also, because there is no MDROOT, you can't 
use a CD2 from the installer without two CD drives.

>> The complication for the release building scripts is that
>> they generate finished ISOs, so anything that goes on the image must be
>> available to the script. The scripts no longer build packages of any
>> kind, and so building even one package substantially adds to their
>> complication.
> That's sounds strange - installation disks always included some packages.
> How it is done, then?

Package installation is treated as a post-install issue. With the 
specific exception of the documentation installation, the installer 
doesn't know anything about packages and can't install them.

>> I also personally think it's not required or even important to provide a
>> way to install the handbook from disc1. The main documentation format
>> for it is HTML, for which we package no readers on disc1. Additionally,
> There was also a .txt version earlier days.
>
>> I'm guessing that basically all of our users read it on www.freebsd.org
>> these days instead of from /usr/local/share, which potentially makes it
>> superfluous to package it at all. Further, without the handbook, how
>> would a new user know to look for it at that path?
> The typical path is that user has heard about Handbook and even looked
> into a chapter or two on the site. Nobody reads entire Handbook before
> install, however (this is just impractical and boring), so he proceeds
> and then founds that there is no network in FreeBSD out-of-box for his
> particular ISP and he needs to read Handbook (and use mpd5 package) -
> but now there will be no Handbook, alas.

There will be on the second packages disk. The user may also have 
another computer, have printed out bits of the handbook, be dual-booting 
etc. I know I've never used the installed handbook before (preferring 
the online one), and didn't even know where it had installed itself to 
until starting to work on the release-building code.
-Nathan