FreeBSD installers and future direction

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 05/27/13 23:36, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> On 5/27/13 6:53 PM, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> On 05/27/13 20:40, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>> On 5/27/13 2:23 PM, Bruce Cran wrote:
>>>> On 27/05/2013 21:28, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>>>> On 5/27/13 11:40 AM, Bruce Cran wrote:
>>>>>> Yes.
>>>>> Is this a joke?
>>>>
>>>> It probably /was/ too short a reply. Personally I think there 
>>>> should be a single UI and scripting interface across all platforms. 
>>>> We should try and get pc-sysinstall running on all of them first in 
>>>> case there's some problem that means it can't be done, in which 
>>>> case we'd need to use a different backend.
>>>>
>>>
>>> There are just going to be certain platforms that make it EASY to do 
>>> cool things.  We should embrace that!  That's why there are 
>>> different platforms!
>>>
>>> Some are great for low power, others are great for graphics, cpu 
>>> power, gpu, networking etc.
>>>
>>> If we always go for the lowest common denominator then we are 
>>> crippling all the platforms for no one's benefit.  Even if something 
>>> CAN be done, if it is very difficult, or just never happening, then 
>>> we can't limit everyone's experience based on the more difficult 
>>> and/or resource strapped platforms.
>>>
>>> It's just not good business.
>>
>> Yes, and all of this cuts both ways: pc-sysinstall has no wireless 
>> setup support, for instance. Right now we support what we support 
>> because it is the most feature-complete thing we have, not just on 
>> tier-2 platforms but also on x86.
>>
>> To bring this discussion back to the ground, the fact is that we lack 
>> an installer that has both internal support for ZFS and a UI. One of 
>> the reasons for this is that making a good expressive UI for ZFS is a 
>> non-trivial undertaking given its enormous flexibility. The 
>> bsdinstall partition editor has been written to be extensible for 
>> this, and several people have started writing code to do it, but no 
>> one ended up having time to finish. Probably a reasonable thing to do 
>> is to start with supporting only a minimal set of features. If anyone 
>> felt like actually writing this code, I'm sure it would be 
>> appreciated by all and be more productive than email exchanges.
>> -Nathan
>
> I'm sure if there was a list of reasonable things, such as wireless 
> then pc-sysinstall could be augmented.  This is the first I've heard 
> of that.  All the other complaints have been based on portability.
>
> Is that all that is required now, wireless?

There are more, as well. A partial list of missing features on both 
sides is here: https://wiki.freebsd.org/PCBSDInstallMerge. Other major 
ones are IPv6 (maybe this has changed?) and no jail setup feature. Most 
of the existing disk partitioning code in pc-sysinstall, which is the 
only thing in a FreeBSD installer that is at all complicated, is also 
*extremely* fragile and needs in all likelihood to be entirely replaced. 
The merge effort stalled because of this kind of issue -- doing a 
"merge" rapidly became rewriting both from scratch.
-Nathan