FreeBSD Installer Roadmap
Nathan Whitehorn
nwhitehorn at freebsd.org
Tue Jan 18 18:38:07 UTC 2011
After some discussion with M. Warner Losh and Josh Paetzel of iX
Systems, we've come up with the following roadmap for an installer for
9.0. Over the next month, we intend to try to adapt bsdinstall as the
front-end for the more featureful, but lacking a terminal-compatible
user interface, pc-sysinstall. This implies that the user interface and
installation flow for the hybrid installer will be extremely similar to
what is currently available in bsdinstall, so please continue sending
feedback and bug reports on it. What will be different is the backend
code, which will allow use of additional features not currently present
in bsdinstall, such as ZFS installation.
At the end of that month period, we'll see how far we've gotten, and
plan to merge either a successful hybridization or to merge bsdinstall
with its own backend, which I will continue to maintain in the interim.
At this point, we plan to integrate whichever installer is merged with
the release infrastructure so that it becomes the default installation
environment presented on snapshot ISOs. If we have have not completed
the hybrid installer at this point, work on hybridization will still
continue after this. Since the interface presented to user will be
extremely similar, a bsdinstall -> pc-bsdinstall transition can happen
with a minimum of user astonishment, or even awareness, at any point in
the future, either before or after the 9.0 release.
This plan ensures that we have a minimum of three months of testing of
the new installer on snapshot media before the 9.0 release, which should
ensure a minimum of bugs. I would also like to point out that there are
no roads in this map that end up with us having sysinstall as the
default installer past the 18th of February. After 15 years of
sysinstall being "greatly in need of death", it will finally be time to
retire it.
Thanks to Warner Losh and Josh Paetzel for excellent discussions. Please
continue to send any comments on this plan, bug reports or feature
requests for bsdinstall or pc-sysinstall, and suggestions for the
installation process.
-Nathan
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