Removal of sysinstall from HEAD and lack of a post-install configuration tool

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday, December 27, 2011 9:32:52 pm Lawrence Stewart wrote:
> On 12/28/11 06:29, Doug Barton wrote:
> > On 12/27/2011 03:48, Lawrence Stewart wrote:
> >> On the topic of Doug's actual question, I see minimal sense in
> >> resurrecting sysinstall in head now. I would suggest it be done much
> >> closer to (say, 6 months before) the 10.0 release cycle, if no suitable
> >> post-installation configuration tool has materialised.
> >
> > My concern about that approach is that 9.0 hasn't even been released yet
> > and we've already seen changes that are going to make it hard to
> > resurrect sysinstall if that's the decision we come to. Waiting another
> > year or 2 would make it impossible.
> 
> Which changes are you referring to? I would have thought a reverse merge 
> to undo the deletion of the sysinstall and old libdialog sources would 
> be very minimal work. We'd also probably need a few extra build system 
> changes to make sure old libdialog is perhaps statically compiled into 
> sysinstall as it would be the only in-tree consumer, but that's not hard 
> either. I may be lacking some imagination, but don't really see why it 
> would become harder the longer we wait.

I think Doug is worried that the list will just get longer, and I agree.
Bits rot faster once they aren't part of the build.  It is easy to delete
sysinstall or trim it, it is not easy to resurrect it.  Personally, the one
time I used bsdinstall recently I found it to be a bit uneven, and not really
a step forward for a new user compared to the "standard" install mode of
sysinstall.  It's biggest win is it's ability to do more disk configurations,
but it seemed less user-friendly in almost every other regard (and even the
disk editor seemd less user-friendly even if it had more functionality).

-- 
John Baldwin