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
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