Re: BSD Installer as a replacement for sysinstall?

> On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 06:32:42PM -0600, Travis Poppe wrote:
>
>> For quite some time I've been looking forward to seeing sysinstall
>> go and be replaced with a new system that's user interface agnostic.
>> This
>> would allow developers to create a user interface of their choice
>> without having to muck around with the internals of the installer.
>> It
>> seems that one of the major reasons this hasn't happened yet is
>> simply due to lack of development.
>>
>> Correct me of I'm wrong, but as far as I know, this is what BSD
>> Installer (the DragonFly team's installer) currently does.
>>
>
> I'm very interested in seeing improvements to the installation and
> management utilities, but I think many of the current problems are
> architectural in the way the base system is packaged, which to me
> means we need to widen the discussion to more than just the
> 'installer' program.
>
>
> Jordan Hubbard wrote an article about these sorts of issues a long
> while back. It took me a while to find it, but here it is:
> http://people.freebsd.org/~jkh/package-and-install.txt
> Five years on, and it reads as if it were written yesterday.
>
>
> Also note here:
> http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=4914+0+archive/2001/freeb
> sd-announce/20010916.freebsd-announce There are links to a binary
> updater project and a sysinstall replacement project. Both are dead as
> far as I can tell.
>
> And from about a year ago:
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-libh/2004-May/000031.html
>
>
> I think this shows that:
> (1) we're going over old ground;
> (2) producing a solution which eliminates the weaknesses of the
> current installer is actually much more difficult than people
> generally think; and (3) this discussion probably belongs somewhere
> other than freebsd-current.
>
> The main problems that have affected me with sysinstall, mostly
> relating to binary upgrades, are listed below. Most of these would
> require a lot more radical overhaul to fix than just replacing
> sysinstall with something that has prettier buttons. That's not to say
> there's no value in just replacing sysinstall with a prettier UI, but
> it would leave a lot of things unsolved. I see little use in having an
> easy first-time install if upgrading to future versions is not equally
> easy. In that case, FreeBSD is likely to become labelled as "insecure"
> as it discourages people from keeping up to date.

What really needs to be done is to separate the installer from the
post-install configuration program.

The OS installer should do nothing more than install the OS.  Don't
configure anything other than the root password and an initial user. 
Just copy the OS to the harddrive.  Everything else (timezone, network
interfaces, packages, everything) should be done post-install, once
you have booted into the OS.  All programs should be disabled until
the admin decides to enable them.  Keep it simple, keep it quick.  And
make it scriptable.

If a GUI configuration program / package installer is needed, it
should be done as a separate project, completely unrelated to the OS
installer.

This is the biggest shortcoming, and albatross for, sysinstall. 
sysinstall is a decent OS installer.  But it's a horrible OS
configurator.  And yet, for some reason, enough people have used it to
configure the OS that any calls for a new installer always seem to
come with a (IMO useless) requirement that is also be an OS
confiugration tool.  Which is ludicrous if you think about it.


-- 
Freddie Cash
fcash_at_ocis.net