FreeBSD installers and future direction

[Dirk Engling]

On 26.05.13 05:42, Teske, Devin wrote:

> I chose 100% sh for bsdconfig because of a few good reasons…

First, the partedit tool makes heavy use of libgeom and the structs
returned from that lib, so I've rather wondered why for some parts C was
preferred, and not the other way around.

Still, thanks for pointing all that out, but I rather wanted to look at
the installer from another angle, as it is supposed to provide everyone
from FreeBSD novices to experts with a comfortable way to do things the
right way and yet be flexible enough to avoid abandoning the tool once
the requirements differ.

So I wonder if there has ever been a best practices document on how to
"properly" set up zpools, when to advice the user against using zfs at
all, whether it makes sense to use geli on the boot device, when it is
better to have multiple zpools and only encrypt the data pool(s). Maybe
the installer should be advocating concepts like manageBE, pre-setting
noexec-flags on /var, setting some default quotas.

The second part, of course, is to find visual concepts on how the user
is guided through the default and expert bsdinstall/bsdconfig screens to
cover the most common scenarios and still offer enough options.

All this doesn't need a developer but a bunch of veteran FreeBSD admins,
a wiki and a lot of bike sheds to paint.

If there's no such document yet, I propose editing one in the wiki.

  erdgeist