Re: My project wish-list for the next 12 months

 Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 15:02:40, scottl wrote about "My project wish-list for the next 12 months": 

[...]
> 2.  New installer.  I know some people still consider this a joke, but
> the reality is that sysinstall is no longer state of the art.  It's
> fairly good at the simple task that it does, but it's becoming harder
> and harder to fix bugs and extend functionality in it.  It's also
> fairly unfriendly to those of us who haven't been using it since 1995.
> The DFly folks have some very interesting work in this area
> (www.bsdinstaller.com) and it would be very good to see if we can
> collaborate with them on it.

If we're going to discuss admin-friendiness...

- Resplit distribution sets. It's simply shame when unpacking base overwrites
existing log files (e.g. during binary upgrade).
At least /etc and /var/log _must_ be separated. Also, I consider openbsd
scheme to be pleasant: separate build tools set (gcc, binutils, etc.)
from main functioning set.
As maximum, convert them into packages and register along with ports.

- Fix the most ugly sysinstall features. E.g. setting active flags on all
partitions by default, along with setting MBR, leads to unbootable system.
This was _constant_ students' error on FreeBSD administration courses.

- Provide more administrative tools. For now, one can't see interface queue
lengths, netgraph queue lens, tune their sizes, calculate memory occupied
by a bunch of processes without multiple counting shared pages...


-netch-