FreeBSD installers and future direction

[Alfred Perlstein]

On 5/28/13 7:49 AM, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> 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
>
Ah this is so cool.  I'll bring it up with the PCBSD folks today.

Thank you Nathan.

-Alfred