Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2004 02:01:58 -0800 From: Chris Pressey <cpressey@catseye.mine.nu> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Cc: scottl@freebsd.org Subject: Re: My project wish-list for the next 12 months Message-ID: <20041205020158.3f6e0a63.cpressey@catseye.mine.nu> In-Reply-To: <41AE3F80.1000506@freebsd.org> References: <41AE3F80.1000506@freebsd.org>
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On Wed, 01 Dec 2004 15:02:40 -0700 Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org> wrote: > All, > > I know that I said last month that we were going to stop promising > specific features for the next major release. However, I'd like to > throw out a list of things that would be really nice to have in the > future, whether its 6.0 or 7.0 or whatever. Most of these tasks are > not trivial, but I hope that talking about them will encourage some > interest. These are in no particular priority order. I'd also be > thrilled if someone wanted to dress this list up in docbook and add > it to the webpage. While this is just my personal list, I'd welcome > other additions to it (in the sense of significant projects, not just > individual PRs or bug fixes that one might be interested in). > > [...] > > 2. New installer. I know some people still consider this a joke, but > the reality is that sysinstall is no longer state of the art. It's > fairly good at the simple task that it does, but it's becoming harder > and harder to fix bugs and extend functionality in it. It's also > fairly unfriendly to those of us who haven't been using it since 1995. > The DFly folks have some very interesting work in this area > (www.bsdinstaller.com) and it would be very good to see if we can > collaborate with them on it. I'm glad you find it interesting. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. There are definately two factors to consider in any attempt to integrate this installer with the FreeBSD release process. One is that it is designed to be run from a fairly full-featured environment (i.e. a LiveCD.) It has been successfully integrated with the latest FreeSBIE though, so beyond that I wouldn't expect many technical difficulties. The other factor is that the BSD installer project is (not unlike DragonFly itself) quite experimental, and we don't hesitate to rewrite entire subsystems (and break the interfaces between them) when a better idea and/or more tractable code comes along. Anyway, since you asked, if I were to write a wish-list for FreeBSD, I guess it would look something like: 1. Flesh out the mission statement, such as it is (FAQ #1.2.) "We provide no-strings-attached software" is an excellent start, but by itself, it's awkwardly nonspecific. Extend it by specifying that the provided software does come, in fact, in the form of an operating system, and describe the intended properties of such (performant/ stable/featureful/easy-to-use/whatever/etc/etc.) -Chris
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