Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 2 Jul 2008 23:59:56 +0100 (BST)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Rob Lytle <jan6146@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years
Message-ID:  <20080702235800.H47773@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <784966050807021123l267aa20en39eb513c12c90ad2@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <784966050807021123l267aa20en39eb513c12c90ad2@mail.gmail.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Rob Lytle wrote:

> My depressing analysis- YMMV. I've used FreeBSD since 1998.

The good news is that there are no less than three in-progress sysinstall 
replacements.  At least two have been posted about recently with test ISOs for 
7.0.  And there are at least a couple of other variations floating around, 
such as the PC-BSD installer.  So I think we can expect to see non-trivial 
progress here in the next year.  My primary concern about some of these 
replacement installer projects is that they've placed a strong focus on making 
them graphical -- I actually couldn't care less about GUIs (and I think they 
actually hurt my configurations, since I use serial consoles a lot), but what 
I do want is a very tight and efficient install process, which I feel 
sysinstall does badly on (not just for the reasons you specify).

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge

>
> 1..Installing the packages off of the menu on the 3 CDROMs is an incredibly
> tedious miserable process.  I had to switch out the CD's around 40 times.
> If you don't believe me, just mark a whole bunch of random packages after
> obtaining the 7.0 release CD's, ad then install.  Its frustrating and almost
> like Windows, except its a bit faster as replacing CD's is faster than
> reboots.
>
> 2.  When installing any given package, if a dependency is already there ,
> the  package aborts and then goes though some loop where you have to press
> OK half a dozen times.  Thats insane.
>
> I think the CD switching problem would be to install all the packages at
> once from CD1, then CD2, then CD3.  As for the second case, I don't know
> enough about the infrastructure to suggest any thing except to perhaps
> comment that code in its entirety or put in  switch to bypass already
> installed dependencies.
>
> I wish I knew more about  your infrastructure to fix this myself.  Is it
> written in Python?  Thats the only language I'm not so rusty at.  I've
> programmed in 5 languages, but that was long ago.  I'm old.  But someone who
> knows the system could probably fix it fast.  I think this is such an
> inherent infrastructure problem that has existed so long that a bug report
> would be futile.
>
> Food for thought.  Thanks,
>
> Rob
>
>
> -- 
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> http://www.youtube.com/user/whiteflluffyclouds
> (Ham radio videos)
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
>



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20080702235800.H47773>