Re: [RFC] Rewriting sade(8)

On Thursday 08 April 2010 5:05:34 am Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> 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.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> 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.

Actually, I would rather have sysinstall just invoke sade to do the disk 
related stuff.  Also, I think sysinstall should allow for a "back-door" mode 
where a user can setup partitions however they like and mount them at /mnt and 
then let sysinstall use the setup the user created.  This will allow users to 
setup more complex setups that sysinstall/sade do not currently support and 
allow sade to focus on simpler, common usage cases w/o having to handle 
painful edge cases.  It would also allow for new modules to be added to sade 
over time w/o requiring it to support every possible disk layout from the 
beginning.

-- 
John Baldwin