Re: Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

> Hear, hear!  To be honest, this is the only bit about the current
> sysinstall that I really dislike:  the fact that it can be used for
> post-installation configuration and package installation.  This causes
> no end of trouble for newbies, who seem to view sysinstall as "The One
> True System Admin Tool" and try to use it for configuring/installing
> everything.  Too many times, on various BSD forums, I've had to walk
> people through cleaning up /etc/rc.conf and showing them how to
> correctly install/configure things (using standard FreeBSD tools),
> since they used sysinstall for everything.

That may be true, but sysinstall did help me do basic, essentical
configuration of my very first installed system, and a few installs after
that (until I learned about /etc/rc.conf et al). And I never regarded it as
The One True Sysadmin Tool, because I did not use Linux distros, thus never
got used to their ways. It's just that the simple configuration menu really
helped me to get a useful system running in a few minutes (though menu items
certainly could make use of more verbose descriptions). And then I could
play with the working system and learn ways to configure it.

So, IMHO, a basic curses system configuration utility is still needed, and
should be run after sysinstall or it should tell the user how to run it
(maybe in motd, or sysinstall itself?).

> IMO, the installer should allow you to partition the disk(s), format
> the partition(s), install the OS, configure a user, and reboot the
> system.  Anything beyond that should be handled by the OS tools, from
> within the installed and running OS.
> 
> The tricky part will be getting the disk slicing, slice partitioning,
> and filesystem formatting to work reliably, with all the power of
> FreeBSD's GEOM modules, and ZFS.

[SorAlx]  ridin' VS1400