Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

On 02/22/11 11:14, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Tuesday, February 22, 2011 11:26:33 am Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> On 02/22/11 06:45, John Baldwin wrote:
>>> On Saturday, February 19, 2011 4:34:11 am grarpamp wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Actually, you can do that if you are a bit creative (add a few more tools to
>>> the mfsroot, and use the 'system' command in install.cfg to invoke a shell
>>> script that then generates a foo.cfg you later include via loadConfig, but
>>> I've covered that at multiple conferences by now).  That said, I'm hopeful
>>> that the new installer will be more flexible in less hackish ways while
>>> letting you do things like PXE boot to a shell where you can use mfiutil to
>>> create a RAID-5 volume and then invoke the installer on that, etc.
>>
>> This is something that I very explicitly built in to the design of
>> bsdinstall. When the installer starts (as well as at several other
>> points), you are offered an option to bring up a shell specifically to
>> do things like this. Scripted installs are just shell scripts instead of
>> a configuration file, so it is trivial to interleave complicated things
>> like this.
>
> Yes, I should have worded it a bit differently in that I do actually think
> that is true from what little I have seen and the "hopeful" bit more refers
> to my being able to adopt it locally.
>

Ah, understood.

Speaking of which, there is a new amd64 snapshot ISO with bsdinstall on 
it (an i386 ISO should follow in the next day or so):
http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-amd64-20110222.iso.bz2

This is more or less the planned final form of the installer and layout 
of the install media, so I would very much appreciate testing at this 
point. Pending a small patch to the distributeworld target currently 
under review, this will be followed by patches to the release Makefile 
to change the default installer to bsdinstall in -CURRENT. Barring any 
objections, I hope to have that second patch in the tree by mid-March.
-Nathan