Simon Burge <simonb@NetBSD.ORG> writes:
> I'm still a few days off sending a couple of ideas to this list about
> what to do with sysinst, but we obviously don't want three different
> people doing three different things to the same part of the program.

Well, I told Tim about my project a while back but he said he wanted
to work on his stuff anyway, and I didn't see why I should stop
him. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.

Anyway....

> Perry - what are you working towards?

Well, my notion is this: I want a much cleaner way of building and
customizing install scripts. To that end, I'm building a system that
will have a curses front end, driven by an embedded scripting language 
(specifically a tiny scheme interpreter that will easily fit in
install media). The install scripts will then be largely written in
scheme, with "the hard stuff" being written in C but invoked from
scheme.

Why scheme? I couldn't find any other language that would fit in just
a few tens of k. Perl takes megs, for instance.

As for the curses front end, there are several possibilities. ncurses
comes with several UI libraries already, and it appears that CDK is
now going to be an official part of ncurses and maintained by the
ncurses team, so that's a possibility, too.

> This is where again I'll say that I'm very impressed with the
> terminal-based Solaris install and was planning on pincing many
> ideas from there.

Well, since the whole thing is going to be script based, we'll have a
lot of flexibility in adopting the ideas from such installers.

I'm going to be starting work in earnest in early June on this, and
hope to have something viewable by the public about six weeks later.

Perry