Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2011 09:50:03 -0600 From: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org> To: Pieter de Goeje <pieter@degoeje.nl> Cc: freebsd-sysinstall@freebsd.org Subject: Re: BSDInstall: merging to HEAD Message-ID: <4D31C22B.8040906@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <201101150730.01010.pieter@degoeje.nl> References: <4D309563.1000404@freebsd.org> <201101150730.01010.pieter@degoeje.nl>
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On 01/15/11 00:30, Pieter de Goeje wrote: > On Friday 14 January 2011 19:26:43 Nathan Whitehorn wrote: >> Demo ISO for i386: >> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-i386-20110114.iso.bz2 > Very cool stuff. I've tried it in VirtualBox and it worked well. Thanks! > I've identified the following issues: > > 1) The Partition Editor asks if you want to create a boot partition (if you > create a partition with mountpoint /) even if one already exists. This is a tricky issue to handle correctly. There may already be a partition with type freebsd-boot, it's true, but there is no guarantee that it has had the bootloader installed. The compromise I hit on was having it ask. > 2) The Partition Editor's confirmation dialog has two options "Don't Save" > and "Cancel"; it is unclear what the difference between the two is. > AFAICT "Don't Save" really means "Cancel installation", and "Cancel" really > means "Re-edit" (I'm sure there's a better word for that). How abort renaming "Don't Save" to "Abort?" > 3) These steps result in an error dialog: "Invalid argument size '0'" > 1) Do a complete guided install on a 4GB disk > 2) Restart installer and choose guided install > 3) Select "partition" instead of "entire disk". Ah, I'll add a check for the too little free space case. The way "Partition" works is that it adds new FreeBSD partitions to the disk in the available space, and it breaks if there is not any. This is easily fixed. > 4) The Complete dialog doesn't say that it will reboot after pressing OK and > gives you no oppertunity to remove the media, so the user will boot straight > back into the installer (depends on bios settings). The first issue is easy to fix. The second is a little tricky to do in the context of booting from a live CD. You can't remove the media while the kernel is running because it's the root filesystem. I'm not sure what the best solution is. > 5) Pressing cancel in the NIC setup dialog doesn't cancel the installation but > continues it without configuring a NIC. Perhaps this could be clarified in > the dialog text. There are several steps like this. The add user, services, keymap, tzsetup, and root password screens can also be canceled (by design). I'm not sure what the optimal way to signal this to the user is. Beat Gaetzi has suggested renaming cancel buttons on cancelable parts of the installation to "Skip". The dialog title text could have have (optional) appended to it or something. The way I had tried to do it is that things that cannot be safely canceled (mostly) don't have cancel buttons right now. > Also, will the complete installer contain& install a copy of /usr/src? Likely. This is the kind of thing I alluded to in the original email as a discussion about the release format that we will need to have after this is merged and before unhooking sysinstall. Other things are how much we want to componentize world -- right now the CDs I put up have a single, monolithic "world" distribution, but we could also have a base world + games + lib32 (amd64/powerpc64) + profiled libs + ... the way sysinstall does. I expect there will be some iterations of the release layout before 9.0. -Nathan
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