Apropos Removal of sysinstall

[Peter J. Cherny]

Rather than hijack the previous thread,
it's probably time to make a few comments on the current and future 
installation and use of ZFS FreeBSD.

I've used both Solaris and FreeBSD since nearly day one for both OSs, so 
have a deal of familiarity in their use.

I believe removal of sysinstall exposes the community's blindness to a 
major parts of it's future, ZFS root.

Other than following arcane recipes,
the only way to create a system with ZFS root is by using Martin 
Matuška's excellent mfsboot images.

Where are the plans for making this functionality mainstream ?

I believe that unless FreeBSD gets it's act together,
Debian/dpkg/zfsonlinux is starting to look like a much more supportable 
environment (i.e. has a future)

Sadly the lack of xen already often forces me to run FreeBSD VMs under 
Debian.

Flames happily accepted if this helps codify FreeBSD's future, but I 
fear it will go the way of Solaris
and be irrelevant to those of us who for decades have used both in the 
server space.

pjc