Request for review/testing: switching the default installer

From: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:49:07 -0600
BSDinstall has acquired at this point its final form (prior to a future 
merge with pc-sysinstall), and I believe is ready to replace sysinstall 
on the 9.0 snapshot ISOs. Barring any objections, I would like to pull 
this switch 2 weeks from today, on the 14th of March.

A patch to the release infrastructure code can be found here (make 
release must be run with Makefile.bsdinstall using this patch to get 
non-sysinstall media):
http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-release.diff

Test ISOs for amd64 and i386 can be found here:
http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-amd64-20110222.iso.bz2
http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-i386-20110224.iso.bz2

More recent test ISOs, as well as ones for other architectures, may be 
available at:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/BSDInstall

Bug reports would be very appreciated at this time. There are three 
known bugs currently, which will be fixed soon, so please don't report 
these: error reporting is not graceful if there are no writable disks in 
the system, you must select at least one optional component, and the doc 
build is not currently connected to the releases.

There are some changes to the distribution format involved in this 
patch, which are outlined below, and about which I would also appreciate 
feedback:
- The src tree is not split up into pieces (e.g. ssbin) as with sysinstall
- Distfiles are not chunked, but are single xz-compressed archives
- There is only one CD image produced, which is always also a live CD
- There are no packages on this CD. There is about 100 MB of free space 
on it right now, so it might make sense to keep it this way and to make 
a separate packages CD/DVD. Removing packages from disc1 also makes 
cross-building release ISOs possible.

Thanks to everyone who has provided testing and feedback over the last 
two months!
-Nathan
Received on Mon Feb 28 2011 - 13:49:11 UTC

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