Re: Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

On Saturday 05 July 2008 11:22:09 am 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 think the best route to that is to have a separate utility for managing disk 
partitioning.  The installer can then use that utility, and sysadmins can 
also use it later after the system is installed.

-- 
John Baldwin