On May 25, 2013, at 9:15 AM, Matt Olander wrote: > On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 8:43 AM, Bruce Cran <br...@cran.org.uk> wrote: >> >> I heard there was some discussion at BSDCan about the direction of a future >> FreeBSD installer. Considering we currently have bsdinstall, pc-sysinstall, >> and an effort to revive sysinstall, I'd be interested to know what was >> decided (if anything) and whether I could help make progress towards getting >> a single really good installer/frontend - instead of the current situation >> with several, none of which have a much-needed UI for setting up an >> installation on ZFS. > > Hey Bruce, > > From my vague recollection, we discussed improving bsdinstall by tying > it in with pc-sysinstall, which we've been threatening to do for at > least a year. Also, there was much discussion about Devin's bsdconfig > perhaps tying in with a Google SoC Project. >
There is indeed a GSoC project to address the situation w/regard to installers. The GSoC project is one submitted by Harsh Bhatt and I've submitted that I wish to Mentor. The project is titled: "Making pc-sysinstall FreeBSD ready by porting it to multiple architectures" The project is designed as such to increase possibilities w/respect to installers. To elaborate… Integrating bsdinstall with pc-sysinstall would introduce a regression because bsdinstall currently supports all platforms, whereas pc-sysinstall has hard-coded assumptions specific to the x86 platform (i386 and amd64 included). If bsdinstall was ever going to be programmed to use pc-sysinstall as a back-end, pc-sysinstall would have to be cleaned up. I'm in no way pushing to integrate bsdinstall with pc-sysinstall… but I *am* saying this is a GSoC project to look out for. The goal of the project is to see if it is even possible to remedy any possibility that tying bsdinstall to pc-sysinstall would introduce a regression in platform support. If the project is successful, PC-BSD should be able to immediately benefit from the fruits thereof (as -- correct me if I'm wrong -- the graphical PC-BSD installer uses pc-sysinstall as a back-end). ASIDE: For what it's worth, it's somewhat convenient to think that in a simple world -- because pc-sysinstall is already the backend of the PC-BSD GUI installer -- FreeBSD would have bsdinstall as the TUI front-end to the same back-end. But however, I'm not naïve and can't imagine that as being clean or elegant unless we can clean up pc-sysinstall. Cleaning up the code is a another major focal-point of the aforementioned GSoC project. With respect to my bsdconfig… (how it relates to installers) Just as there were blockers preventing pc-sysinstall from being integrated into bsdinstall. There are blockers that prevent bsdinstall from being integrated into the larger bsdconfig framework. In the case of pc-sysinstall integrating to bsdinstall, pc-sysinstall doesn't support all the target architectures that bsdinstall does. Meanwhile, in the case of bsdinstall integrating into bsdconfig, bsdinstall doesn't support all the features of bsdconfig. Luckily, introduction of most features to bring bsdinstall on-par with bsdconfig will be easy as we can just make bsdinstall use the subroutine includes from bsdconfig. However, there are other things that just can't be done without plain sweat and labor… For example, making bsdinstall i18n-ready (as bsdconfig is). I expect this to take (with a medium effort) a week or two, aided by the fact that the dialog(1) abstraction API offered by bsdconfig makes most of that transparent (for example, you don't have to worry about whether the "Yes" button says "Ja", "Oui", or "Yes" -- you just call f_dialog_yesno() and it worried about how to call dialog(1) to form the proper i18n-compatible prompt). Another big change to bsdinstall would be to make it *more* modular and rewrite the C components to be in sh. > I think Devin was nominated for most of the work, since he was unable > to defend himself :P > I don't mind being volunteered. In earnest, I figure the code I'm working on is volunteering enough. -- Devin _____________ The information contained in this message is proprietary and/or confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please: (i) delete the message and all copies; (ii) do not disclose, distribute or use the message in any manner; and (iii) notify the sender immediately. In addition, please be aware that any message addressed to our domain is subject to archiving and review by persons other than the intended recipient. Thank you. _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
