Re: Removal of sysinstall from HEAD and lack of a post-install configuration tool

On Thursday, December 29, 2011 11:37:25 am Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> On 12/29/11 06:52, John Baldwin wrote:
> > On Tuesday, December 27, 2011 9:32:52 pm Lawrence Stewart wrote:
> >> On 12/28/11 06:29, Doug Barton wrote:
> >>> On 12/27/2011 03:48, Lawrence Stewart wrote:
> >>>> On the topic of Doug's actual question, I see minimal sense in
> >>>> resurrecting sysinstall in head now. I would suggest it be done much
> >>>> closer to (say, 6 months before) the 10.0 release cycle, if no suitable
> >>>> post-installation configuration tool has materialised.
> >>>
> >>> My concern about that approach is that 9.0 hasn't even been released yet
> >>> and we've already seen changes that are going to make it hard to
> >>> resurrect sysinstall if that's the decision we come to. Waiting another
> >>> year or 2 would make it impossible.
> >>
> >> Which changes are you referring to? I would have thought a reverse merge
> >> to undo the deletion of the sysinstall and old libdialog sources would
> >> be very minimal work. We'd also probably need a few extra build system
> >> changes to make sure old libdialog is perhaps statically compiled into
> >> sysinstall as it would be the only in-tree consumer, but that's not hard
> >> either. I may be lacking some imagination, but don't really see why it
> >> would become harder the longer we wait.
> >
> > I think Doug is worried that the list will just get longer, and I agree.
> > Bits rot faster once they aren't part of the build.  It is easy to delete
> > sysinstall or trim it, it is not easy to resurrect it.  Personally, the one
> > time I used bsdinstall recently I found it to be a bit uneven, and not really
> > a step forward for a new user compared to the "standard" install mode of
> > sysinstall.  It's biggest win is it's ability to do more disk configurations,
> > but it seemed less user-friendly in almost every other regard (and even the
> > disk editor seemd less user-friendly even if it had more functionality).
> >
> 
> I'd appreciate any specific comments you might have, and especially 
> specific suggestions for improvements. Except from people who are old 
> hands at sysinstall, I've received almost universally positive comments 
> on the user experience. Patches would be even more appreciated, since 
> real life has intervened to steal most of my FreeBSD time.

A way to select from available partition types (UFS, boot, swap, ZFS, etc.)
rather than requiring the user to remember the 'freebsd-xxx' string would be
one improvement.  At the time I was more worried about getting my box up
and running than taking detailed notes. :)  The lack of a /compat link is
another issue people have raised.  The lack of a shell running on ttyv3
during the install is probably a feature I think many "advanced" users would
miss.  I missed having the debug output on ttyv1 as well.  At work here it
would be a deal-killer for my sysadmins to not have ttyv3.  We use a custom
installer for our boxes that I wrote as a shell script and it still does
debug/verbose output on ttyv1.  It doesn't start an explicit shell on ttyv3,
but I have a login prompt there that they can use and I've thought about
even replacing that with an explicit chroot'd shell ala sysinstall.  I can't
count the number of times I've used the shell on ttyv3 during installs.

For new users the ability to browse the packages, etc. I think is important.
It certainly was for me back when I first installed FreeBSD back in college.
I don't recall seeing that option during the one install I did of 9.

-- 
John Baldwin