Re: New installation script

In article <4E3D55FD.7090803_at_freebsd.org>, nwhitehorn_at_freebsd.org writes:
>I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. Whenever you add a / 
>partition on a partitioning scheme that requires a boot partition (APM, 
>GPT on some platforms), the installer asks you if you want to add a boot 
>partition. The auto-partitioner does this automatically. It does not 
>reuse any existing boot partition for two reasons:
>- It has no way to know the other boot partition was correctly set up 
>and so would need to reinitialize it.
>- There is no guarantee that it is even related to FreeBSD. On APM 
>disks, we share a boot partition type with OS X and Linux.

Having just been through this, I can only say that neither of these
arguments apply when the boot partition exists only in the memory of
the partition editor and was never on the (freshly initialized) disk.
I was a bit taken aback when I deleted and recreated the / partition
(since I didn't want the "everything in one partition" layout it
defaulted to) and it wanted to create *another* boot partition.

Another issue I had was that it was unclear which keymap I was
expected to choose.  I initially chose "traditional Unix workstation",
which was unusable.  (Never did find the control or escape key, which
made vi particularly difficult to use.)  The default selection in the
keymap dialog ought to be "don't screw with it" rather than an option
which is not obviously correct.  Forcing users to set a system
timezone is probably a good idea, too; I had not noticed that it never
asked me for one until I ran the "date" command and found my system
running in UTC.

The new version of dialog feels cheesy compared to the old one.

(Unrelated to the installer:) There's a lock order reversal the first
time a new directory is created, and another one when the system is
rebooted.

-GAWollman