Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2001 13:29:23 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Bill Moran <wmoran@iowna.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Mall now BSDCentral Message-ID: <3B4A1423.E8E365E@mindspring.com> References: <20010706144935.A61843@xor.obsecurity.org> <3B4650D0.97F10B83@bellatlantic.net> <20010707002340.B16071@widomaker.com> <20010707004731V.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <3B49F8D5.2C9BFA73@mindspring.com> <3B4A0124.26025FB5@iowna.com>
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Bill Moran wrote: > Terry Lambert wrote: > > > Historically, you've always held that the CDROM must boot > > to sysinstall. As the software's daddy, I can see why > > you'd want that; but your baby is ugly. > > > > I don't see anyone stepping up to replace it any time > > soon, so long as you insist that they not be able to > > make money from it, and they can't use the trademark > > if the don't include that blecherous software as the > > default thing to which CDROMs boot. Yetch. > > 2 practical questions: > What *exactly* do you see wrong with sysinstall and what > *exactly* would you do to improve it. > > I've been looking for various projects to work on, but > sysinstall has never looked (to me) like it needed any > serious work. Perhaps I'm looking at it wrong. The base system is not registered into the packages system, because of sysinstall. There are a lot of navigational problems with the code; Eric Melville is addressing some of them. The disk partitioning sucks. The upgrade process should automatically discover the FS mount points. Backing up the configuration before attempting to merge is inadequate; it also takes a long time. Most of the work should be done using async mounts, or at least soft updates. With write caching AND SU off by default, the 4.3 distribution takes forever to do its thing. There are a number of bugs; for example, if you go into the packages, it's actually off-by-one on the description line (i.e. the wrong field is displayed as the long description). It's too "chatty". It wants hand-holding at the end, instead of just doing the right thing. The network setup should attempt to obtain a DHCP lease, without having to be told to do it, at least for initial install. There's no "sysinstall" broken out on the disk by itself, which means that I have to install it somewhere so that I can copy it so that I can install it over an NFS mount on systems without CDROMs. Doing an NFS based install, without booting from the CD itself results in /dev/MAKEDEV and /dev/MAKEDEV.local not being correctly updated. Without the new /dev/random, you end up not having a working ssh. Similar problem, but /etc/pam.conf isn't updated to add the new sshd lines; this is a nasty surprise, particularly if you are SSH'ed in to do the update. Without the patches I posted, you can't build from a custom kernel configuration, since sysinstall fails to copy the "/kernel.MYCONF" to "/kernel", leaving you without a "/kernel". This is particularly nasty, if all you have is a serial console, and don't output the boot messages or prompt via "/boot.config" (embedded systems land), since you've just turned your machine into a doorstop, and must disassemble it to get the disk into somewhere you can mount it and copy the file manually. There are too many steps. X11 is a distribution set, instead of a package. Etc. (I could go on forever). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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