Re: [RFC] Rewriting sade(8)

Quoting Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des_at_des.no> (from Thu, 08 Apr 2010  
11:05:34 +0200):

> Alexander Leidinger <Alexander_at_Leidinger.net> writes:
>> Please consider using SVN instead. A lot more users will be able to
>> check out from there.
>
> We don't grant non-committers access to the Subversion repo.

Ooops... seems I misremembered his status. Somehow I associate him  
with something FreeBSD related. Andrey, did you participate in a GSoC?

>> It looks like other people had a look at sysinstall, not at sade. As
>> sysinstall is supposed to be used at installation time, and the intent
>> for sade was to offer the functionality (or more) of the part of
>> sysinstall which is useful after installation (and to prevent admins
>> from using sysinstall after the installation to prevent some unwanted
>> foot-shooting), I do not think that we need to think about a strong
>> lock between sysinstall and sade.
>
> Yes we do.  Otherwise we'll just end up back where we are today, where
> if you want anything more complicated than a single-disk install you
> have to drop into the fixit shell and do it manually before running the
> installation procedure.  Anythig that sade can do, we want sysinstall to
> do as well, and we don't want to implement everything twice.

 From the man page:
---snip---
NOTES
      The sade utility aims to provide a handy tool for disk management tasks
      on an already installed system.
---snip---

Disk management tasks contains stuff which exceeds what sysinstall  
needs to provide. One possible extension is to display content from  
/etc/dumpdates along with partitions (would be helpful if someone uses  
dump to make backups and wants to delete a partition, but only if  
there is a recent backup available).

> My suggestion is to add a "sysinstall mode" to sade where it operates
> under certain (minor) constraints and reports what it did in a format
> that sysinstall can parse, so sysinstall can just fork-exec sade instead
> of duplicating the code.

I think this is more complicated than to refactor the interesting part  
into a backend with an API which both tools can use. This would also  
allow someone to write a GUI program (e.g. for PC-BSD).

Again, there is no need for a *strong* lock between sysinstall and  
sade. Both should provide similar features regarding partition and  
slice handling, but they do not need to share exactly the same  
interface code.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
Above all else - sky.

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander _at_ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild _at_ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137