Re: Request for review/testing: switching the default installer

On 02/28/11 09:20, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Monday, February 28, 2011 9:49:07 am Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> 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
> Hmm, does your installed world include the pre-built mergemaster database?
> That should really be preserved.
>
> It happens here in the old release Makefile:
>
> # Install the system into the various distributions.
> release.2:
>          cd ${.CURDIR}/..&&  ${CROSSMAKE} distrib-dirs DESTDIR=${RD}/trees/base
>          cd ${.CURDIR}/..&&  ${CROSSMAKE} ${WORLD_FLAGS} distributeworld \
>              DISTDIR=${RD}/trees
>          sh ${.CURDIR}/scripts/mm-mtree.sh -F "${CROSSENV}" -D
> "${RD}/trees/base"
>          touch ${.TARGET}
>
> I use a one-line patch locally to bootstrap etcupdate into the worlds I
> package up at work via a similar one-liner.

And this is why sending out patches for review is a good idea. I've 
updated my code to call into this script, though it would be nice if, 
say, make distribution handled this. Thanks for pointing it out.

>> 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
> I would at least like to have src split up into two pieces:
>
> 1) would be equivalent of sbase and ssys of old distributions, so you could
> choose to just install kernel sources along with the top-level Makefile bits
> to build kernels.  I commonly install this subset on production machines so I
> can install a custom kernel in a pinch.
>
> 2) would be everything else in the source tree.

This is a little bit tricky, since it involves inter-distribution 
dependencies which don't currently exist (e.g. you need sbase for ssys 
to be useful, and for severythingelse to be useful). I suppose that the 
top-level Makefile bits are small and could end up in both archives, 
where one can overwrite the other with the same thing. Would that solve 
your problem?
-Nathan