FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

Sysinstall is fine, as I'm sure any replacement will be. So I'll
just note a few things I'd like to see in any such replacement...

1 - I used install.cfg's on floppies to clone systems, a lot. Hands
on the box were needed with that. Operators skills were in question,
so having them use the dialog menus properly was a pain and often
resulted in non-zeroed disk or half built systems. And though all
else was cloned, it needed a separate <host>.cfg for each box due
to:

fqdn, gateway, ip/mask
interface - sometimes changed
root disk - sometimes changed

Would have killed for a simple console shell script to ask those
questions of the operator, per machine.

2 - Being able to skip, replace, or prefix/suffix each stage of
whatever the installer would do with a shell script (ala: distSetCustom
local) would be cool.

3 - Options to dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[x] bs=1m, where x are any
boot sectors, drives, slices, partitions, labels, etc that would
otherwise be blown away but not fully wiped beforehand.


And a request for some remaining bugs to be fixed, implemented anew
or figured out...

1 - Setting debug=yes was great[a], up until you tried to get that
resultant file off the system or view it. Due to the way things
were mounted with mfsroot and the alt-f4 shell being separate, I
never did figure out how to do that.

[a] - only when calling /stand/sysinstall from your development box
to test your install.cfg, and the install process. Not when actually
installing a box.

2 - mediaClose - didn't work right. I couldn't get the base
distribution bits from one ftp server, and the local distribution
bits from another.


And in general, I'll cheer for whichever camps are doing...
As opposed to mfsroot, boot a stripped kernel, on real filesystem,
with init to shell to installer.
and installroot things from there.
Some sort of plaintext backend that can read a config.
Pluggable frontends, at minimum 80x25 console shell, then
dialog/web/xorg/whatever.
Network boot, retrieve config via net, etc.

It would be cool to have an 'installer build' config option set
available during buildworld too. Much like you can configure crunchgen
to customize the crunch, you could customize certain parts of how
you wanted the installer to work. Particularly for things that might
take up space, what it thinks are its first places to get input,
boot from, display, where to find its config while blind, etc.
And a stripped buildworld kernel config for use with the installer.
Call it just more permutations on the liveCD concept.