FreeBSD installers and future direction

[Dirk Engling]

On 26.05.13 01:07, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:

> I'm not aware of any movement there (on either side of the table). I'd
> personally be very suspicious of an all-sh(1) future -- by far the
> cleanest parts of bsdinstall are in C -- and this is especially true for
> interacting with geom. That said, since I've lost nearly all of my free
> time and ability to work on bsdinstall, I won't get in the way of anyone
> else working on things

As discussed at BSDCan, I'd be willing to participate in the development
and at least implement setting up zpools/zfs and geli/gbde providers. I
have done similar things in sh in my ezjail tools and think I can glue
the rest together.

Scanning through the pc-sysinstall code, I find nothing too fancy there
regarding either interaction with zfs nor geom tools. I do not think it
is necessary as a back end just for these features.

Nathan, is there any design rationale available for the scripts, e.g. on
why you chose sh versus C and were you provided with some kind of wish
list/requirements in the first place? Any particular mail thread to scan
through beforehand?

Regards,

  erdgeist