FreeBSD installers and future direction

[Teske, Devin]

On May 25, 2013, at 11:26 AM, Bruce Cran wrote:

> On 25/05/2013 17:15, Matt Olander wrote:
>> From my vague recollection, we discussed improving bsdinstall by tying
>> it in with pc-sysinstall, which we've been threatening to do for at
>> least a year. Also, there was much discussion about Devin's bsdconfig
>> perhaps tying in with a Google SoC Project.
>> 
>> I think Devin was nominated for most of the work, since he was unable
>> to defend himself :P
> 
> Thanks. From previous discussions with Devin I think he has other plans for the installer that don't involve pc-sysinstall. But since it seems the future is all sh(1) code, I won't be able to contribute.
> 

The future of how these softwares become entangled to produce something better:

+ bsdinstall
+ pc-sysinstall
+ bsdconfig

Is in my mind entirely still open as I work to finish up bsdconfig.

I was thinking…

Perhaps just rewrite bsdinstall from scratch (using the existing code as a template).

Have to put pc-sysinstall on the back-burner for any/all considerations until the code is cleaned up and actually usable on all architectures (there's a GSoC project to do exactly that -- I'm the potential mentor; project is pending status).

So unless this GSoC goes through and we are able to (as we plan) clean up that mess…

Defacto plan is to just rewrite bsdinstall from scratch (again… using the existing code as a template).

In said rewrite… I'd *heavily* leverate usr.sbin/bsdconfig/share/*.subr (specifically "dialog.subr" -- the abstraction layer that allows me to have nice i18n-ready dialogs and also gracefully handle dialog in a way that makes my code look very clean).



> https://wiki.freebsd.org/PCBSDInstallMerge lists a few limitations with pc-sysinstall - are these being fixed?
> 

I can see if the GSoC student for the "Making pc-sysinstall FreeBSD ready by porting it to multiple architectures" project is willing to incorporate any of those limitations into his work. But I think the focus of the project should be to clean up the code and make it work on at least one other important non-x86 architecture. Barring that…

You're absolutely right in stating that any/all discussions on merging pc-sysinstall with bsdinstall would result in a regression with pc-sysinstall in its current state.
-- 
Devin

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