Re: [RFC] Rewriting sade(8)

On 04/08/2010 18:15, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Devin Teske<dteske_at_vicor.com>  wrote:
>    
>> Randi and I were discussion the possibility of having sysinstall
>> "remember" what you did and then able to write out a suitable
>> `install.cfg' file that could be subsequently used to perform a human-
>> less automated install with the same settings.
>>      
>    

In a sense that's what our back-end / front-end is doing currently.

The program flow works like thus:

Front-end starts, queries all relevant information from back-end, Disks, 
Network Cards, etc,
then proceeds to walk the user through the steps gathering enough 
information to perform
an installation. This gives front-end control over its own data 
gathering logic from the user,
since the way I do something in a QT GUI may not work via command-line 
without a mouse
or the other way around.

When we are done gathering information, the front-end writes out an 
install.cfg directive
and starts the back-end processing it. The front-end then waits and 
displays backend output
to the user in a sane manner, allowing user to watch whats going on.

(example)
http://trac.pcbsd.org/browser/pcbsd/trunk/pc-sysinstall/examples/pcinstall.cfg.zfs

So with this method, its pretty much doing what you describe. Every 
install is a scripted
install, and if you want to do unattended installs, you can use the 
front-end to generate
all the options you want, copy and/or tweak the resulting config to be 
used again later.

If the backend is simply a library and not executable, then you'll end 
up needing
scripting support or ways to run one implemented directly in each 
front-end, which can get
messy to maintain across curses/gtk/qt/web, etc.


-- 
Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software
iXsystems