From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jan 9 07:25:01 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5BBF916A403 for ; Tue, 9 Jan 2007 07:25:01 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tedm@toybox.placo.com) Received: from mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com (mail.web-strider.com [65.75.192.90]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 004EC13C45B for ; Tue, 9 Jan 2007 07:25:00 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tedm@toybox.placo.com) Received: from coolf89ea26645 (nat-rtr.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com [65.75.197.130]) by mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com (8.11.1/8.11.1) with SMTP id l097Opx60391; Mon, 8 Jan 2007 23:24:51 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tedm@toybox.placo.com) Message-ID: <004401c733bf$02c47cb0$3c01a8c0@coolf89ea26645> From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" To: "Tore Lund" , References: <73387c420701071410p710a3436gdecda61d57643950@mail.gmail.com><17825.31582.782224.263685@jerusalem.litteratus.org> <45A18615.9000900@netscape.net> Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2007 23:21:27 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1807 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1807 Cc: Subject: Re: Why is sysinstall considered end-of-life? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2007 07:25:01 -0000 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tore Lund" To: 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