Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:12:41 -0600 From: Josh Paetzel <josh@tcbug.org> To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Cc: Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Devin Teske <dteske@vicor.com>, freebsd-sysinstall@freebsd.org, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap Message-ID: <201102211612.51233.josh@tcbug.org> In-Reply-To: <201102190844.43267.bruce@cran.org.uk> References: <4D35CFFB.3010302@freebsd.org> <61079648-D76C-4699-AC4D-F6EBE64ABFFC@vicor.com> <201102190844.43267.bruce@cran.org.uk>
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--nextPart3047959.TjBYZPoihf Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Saturday, February 19, 2011 02:44:42 am Bruce Cran wrote: > On Saturday 19 February 2011 03:04:39 Devin Teske wrote: > > There are many reasons for this, and none of them are selfish (although > > it remains possible to drum-up some selfish reason, all of the reasons > > behind our motivation are in-fact unselfish). Truth-be-told, I welcome > > the replacement of sysinstall but am very wary that ANY replacement will > > be able to exactly replicate the hardware compatibility that sysinstall > > currently enjoys. I do indeed envision a great celebration as FreeBSD-9 > > bucks sysinstall but also at the same time have nightmares of receiving > > waves of calls from people having trouble (for example) "installing > > FreeBSD-9 on their AMD K6 based system, circa long-long-ago in a > > universe far-far-away." (yes, we do have data centers running that very > > equipment with uptime in the 1,000's of days). >=20 > I think bsdinstall as it currently is is simple enough that there shouldn= 't > be any compatibility issues: it uses gpart for partitioning, runs tools > like tzsetup to configure settings etc. so there's far less to go wrong > than sysinstall's custom code which for example could crash on the > "probing devices" screen. pc-sysinstall has been used as the PC-BSD installer for quite a while now, = and=20 has done a lot of installs on a lot of different hardware platforms. I'll= =20 wager that the compatibility of the shell command gpart is a better bet tha= n=20 the "stick your thumbs in you ears and yell nananana while you scribble 1's= =20 and 0's to a disk and voila, there's a disklabel" approach that sysinstall= =20 uses. That being said, sysinstall holds FreeBSD back in a lot of ways, using GPT= =20 labeling, installing to ZFS, or gmirror, using geli, all require you to boo= t=20 to a shell and do an install by hand. I'm sure more people can chime in to= =20 limitations in sysinstall than I can think of off the top of my head. So my question is: Given that everyone involved is very conscious of lockin= g=20 out FreeBSD from hardware platforms due to installer compatibility, wouldn'= t a=20 better use of your time be investing in the future and ensuring that it wor= ks=20 on legacy platforms as opposed to putting sysinstall on life support when i= t=20 already has some fairly serious missing functionality, that is only likely = to=20 become more of an issue in the future? =2D-=20 Thanks, Josh Paetzel --nextPart3047959.TjBYZPoihf Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.15 (FreeBSD) iQEcBAABAgAGBQJNYuNhAAoJEKFq1/n1feG2ys8H/2ftBaqnaq9mZcXsY0iWQ8J9 tz35avx7w4633MOdWCdjMUIFfQXStRCR1L18fBSXPfhzhd6hgzkUDRHZmpk/OZfo 6PBzHU/bGBb2qSYpPblUiCLeh+y8rNVSezSKazay5B8Cr2teb5sVFBm1n45H4sx1 ZO6q+7zBhFSfmGxF62H9zktk0m81lmI0DU5Uu9WYUdZlUO9FUOD2cWAFYwIux1OG tMzZTfqEmPllgzb3nneWtxZt9l8ZEki7RryHtE0JyhwPk3w0U0ytameZ5dReK+S4 A1Nua+1Y5HEzpfWFCxYDiT8cxwru67g2bq03iBZrgAfVnobffS04XB2HuTfjbzA= =3JpJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --nextPart3047959.TjBYZPoihf--
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