Bsdinstall on release 8.3?

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 06/14/12 17:48, Dave Hayes wrote:
> Nathan Whitehorn<nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>  writes:
>> On 06/13/12 23:14, Dave Hayes wrote:
>>> Hello. I'm trying vainly to get bsdinstall to work on FreeBSD 8.3, and
>>> I'm wondering just what it would take to get this package to build?
>> It won't work without a lot of effort. It depends on a new version of
>> libdialog, for one, but also a number of library and kernel changes.
>> What you *can* do is use bsdinstall to install an 8.3 system from 9.0
>> media by replacing its distributions tarballs with older ones.
> Ok, thanks for that. I have rather unusual constraints which force me to
> have it work on 8.3 or not use it at all.
>
> I guess the next idea would be to replace the binary executables with
> scripts that do roughly the same things on FreeBSD 8. Did you build any
> extensibility options into the tool (other than running based on shell
> scripts) which I should know about?

The facilities for doing the things the partition editor (for instance) 
does are not readily available as shell scripts. For example, it relies 
on custom dialog widgets -- but also depends on specially formed geom 
requests and the ability to parse the entire geom tree. The new 
libdialog is available on 8.3 (ports cdialog) and it is possible the 
kernel changes, which are minor, could be backported if you really need 
this.
-Nathan