Re: Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

Robert Watson wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Jul 2008, Mike Makonnen wrote:
>
>> The installer can already install a basic FreeBSD system (including 
>> the ports collection) from CD, UFS, or DOS partition. I'm currently 
>> working on getting FTP/HTTP/NFS installation to work. Next on my list 
>> after that is setting Date and Time Zone. At that stage the installer 
>> will be more or less feature-complete, and I can start code cleanup, 
>> getting it to work on additional architectures, etc. I had initially 
>> intended to include package installation as one of the criteria for 
>> feature-completeness, but after reading through this thread I've 
>> decided not to use sysinstall's package installation code and instead 
>> write one from scratch once I'm happy with the rest of the installer.
>
> Sounds pretty much in line with what I was looking for.  However, I 
> think I would like to see it be a bit more complete than sysinstall in 
> the area of geom partition labeling (concat/strip/raid/encryption), 
> and perhaps also ZFS support.  I realize that adds complexity a fair 
> amount, but one of the biggest areas of feature lack in sysinstall 
> today is that you are basically stuck with the original BSD partition 
> structure and UFS, whereas we expect increasing numbers of users to 
> deploy ZFS.  We don't have boot support currently, but being able to 
> set up /data as a ZFS file system would be great.  Today, people have 
> to do an initial install on, say, a small boot partition and then 
> relabel/deal with the rest of the disk, boot a live CD, or worse, 
> discover they have to repartition, which really fails to expose some 
> of the excellent ease-of-use, auto-configuration, etc, features that 
> we otherwise have in this area.
I agree absolutely. I should have said ".... more or less 
feature-complete for a 1.0 release".

Cheers.

-- 
Mike Makonnen       | GPG-KEY: http://people.freebsd.org/~mtm/mtm.asc
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