On Sun, 2 Aug 1998 20:19:22 +0200 (MEST)  Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> -> How about mentioning a simple "reboot" as final step of the MD
>    steps, and then continue in the (MI) post-install steps with the
>    single user shell that'll pop up, editing at least rc.conf
>    etc. (see [2] for some ideas).
>
>  [[ stuff deleted ]]
>
> [3] Don't stuff this into sysinst. It'll only bload sysinst with stuff
>     that's not needsd in the first place (i.e. during bootstrapping
>     the system); This postinst program could care for many of the
>     points listed above with some menu system etc. 

I believe you should be able to configure your system before the
reboot.  This would mean either that sysinst does all the work, or that
a separate program called by sysinst before the reboot would do the
/etc/rc.conf work (maybe a /sbin/sysconf or similar).  Having either
sysinst or a separate program that can do this at any time the system
needs reconfiguration needs should also be a goal too.

I've not been a great user of the package system yet, but is it possible
to load binary packages into a new system mounted at (say) /mnt, and all
the right "bits" get updated?  If this is the case, then even packages
could be loading in the one installation step.

Taking this another step (as has been mentioned somewhere that I can't
remember), you could have all of this ("this" being system config info,
which packages to load, anything else we can think of) driven by some
sort of config file (whether it be NIS, bind/hesiod, dhcp?, something
tftp/ftp'd, etc) means that you can for example start sysinst on each
machine in a lab, and come back however long later and have all the
machines at the login prompt.

All of the above IMHO of course.

Simon.