Why is sysinstall considered end-of-life?
David Schulz
mailinglists at tca-cable-connector.com
Tue Jan 9 08:33:39 UTC 2007
to be honest, i actually like the sys-install program. i did it so
many times, that i just fly trough the sys-install installation in
like a minute to do a plain basic installation. i also like the fact
that i can just use it via ssh from a remote location without a hassle.
David
On Jan 9, 2007, at 3:21 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Tore Lund" <toreld at netscape.net>
> To: <questions at freebsd.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 07, 2007 3:45 PM
> Subject: Re: Why is sysinstall considered end-of-life?
>
>
>> Robert Huff wrote:
>>> (Personally, I think there are also points where the correct user
>>> behavior is not intuitively obvious.)
>>
>> An understatement. There are situations where sysinstall is
>> positively
>> quixotic. I don't mind the simple character-based interface. But
>> I do
>> find it worrying that I sometimes cannot know what sysinstall will do
>> next. In any case, this is bad publicity for FreeBSD since
>> sysinstall
>> is the first bit of FreeBSD they encounter.
>>
>
> All of this is true.
>
>> Time and again we hear rumors about a new installation program.
>> Is it
>> actually nearing completion? Keep in mind that many of us do not
>> even
>> consider getting involved as long as we believe a better program is
>> under way.
>
> There is no new installation program underway.
>
> This comes up every year or so on the various discussion lists,
> everyone
> bashes sysinstall and claims it makes FreeBSD look bad and when are
> we going to get a replacement, etc. The arguments die away when faced
> with the following cold realities:
>
> 1) You can probably get consensus from everyone that sysinstall is
> ugly
> and needs replacement. But your never going to get any consensus on
> what the replaement should look like. And any replacement is going to
> have places where the user cannot know what it's going to do next,
> that
> is just the nature of install programs - it is due to the fact that
> different people
> interpret things differently. What is obvious to you isn't obvious to
> someone
> else. And, when is the install program going to cross the line
> between
> acting as a install program and acting as a training video?
>
> Review the steps needed to install a self-signed SSL certificate into
> Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, and then come back and tell me that
> those steps are more intuitive than sysinstall. Yeah, right. Face
> the
> facts, boys. Every year, computers get more complex to operate, and
> every year, the Average User is paying more and more to have a tech
> set the computer up for them. Open your eyes and look around. People
> think nothing of paying $30 to have a tech install Microsoft Office
> on their
> new Windows PC for God's sake.
>
> Who really is sysinstall's audience? The average l-user? Or the
> average
> technician? If it's the average tech, then who the hell cares how
> ugly
> sysinstall is? You think sysinstall is bad, you ought to see the
> diagnostic
> interface
> the average auto mechanic has to use to troubleshoot your car. If
> you are
> not the ultimate end-user for the FreeBSD system your installing, then
> you don't have any moral ground to make a call for pussifying the
> FreeBSD
> install program. I can tell you that for myself, every FreeBSD
> system I've
> installed in the last year and a half has been for OTHERS to use,
> NOT ME.
>
> 2) There's an immense amount of effort that has gone into
> sysinstall and
> it's libraries. Your talking about taking on an old, established
> program
> that
> is pretty throughly debugged, a program that is like an octopus in the
> amount of icky, ugly mucking around with config files and such that
> it does,
> and replacing this with a new program that is going to have all of the
> intelligence and institutional knowledge in it that the old program
> does.
> And furthermore if this replacement is to ever get traction among the
> userbase it's going to have to work PERFECTLY in the FIRST version
> that is released, otherwise everyone is just going to turn their
> back on it
> and keep using the existing sysinstall.
>
> 3) The largest complaint about sysinstall is that it's not
> graphical. The
> problem is that a graphical installation program has some -severe-
> constraints on it. First, it has to work in ALL instances. That
> means,
> 640x480x16 colors VGA screen. You have a lot of people out there
> installing on systems that have, for example, monitors with inadequate
> horizontal/vertical frequency ranges and very capabable video cards,
> unless you force the X-server to use the original VGA resolution,
> it's going
> to overdrive those monitors and the user is going to see a black
> screen
> when the installation program comes up. And the only way FreeBSD
> is going to get a graphical anything is by using Xorg, and FreeBSD
> does
> not maintain that distribution - so we are now dependent on the Xorg
> group writing their code with no bugs for our installation program
> to work.
>
> 4) Installation programs by and large are not "fun" programs to work
> on. Most developers avoid them. They are thankless tasks - you
> don't hear squat for thanks from anyone when they work, but you make
> the least mistake and everyone is on your neck.
>
> 5) Finally, sysinstall is a one-shot program. You use it once, the
> system
> is
> installed, and you never have to touch it again. There's lots of
> other
> things
> in FreeBSD that are critical things that will stop an installation
> cold.
> Such
> as lack of device support for some new piece of hardware. These
> things
> are much higher on the priority list than replacing sysinstall, a
> working
> program.
>
> Ted
>
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