On 26-Nov-99 Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> After more though I though it would be better
> to add this functionality to sysinst itself.

Awhile ago I had been looking at doing this.. but it got shoved to the bottom
of my queue due to some other work I deemed more important.

What I had come up with was a two-stage install.

sysinst:
        Would ask the user lots of questions, and generate a file like the one
you described.. describing the entire install.

postinst: (or some other better name)
        Would parse the file and perform the actual install.

The idea being.. one could easily write up a generic data file.. and hand it to
"postinst" and have it do everything for you.. like jumpstart.  It would also
remove the number one complaint about sysinst, in that you cant just answer
some questions and walk away.

One concept I came up with to do this would be the idea of percentages, or
"remaining percentages"  where I could deifne a disk such as wd0 as:

wd0a    30MB
wd0b    RAM*2
wd0e    180MB
wd0f    50% remaining
wd0g    all remaining

And with a little parsing and math.. the right thing would happen.  An admin
could easily write these datafiles.. and mass-install hoards of machines.

I guess what I would really like to see, is the GUI and the work being
separated into two programs.. the second of which would simply display a
progress bar. (and perhaps a log window)

my installtab looked like this:
filesystems {
        bsd_label {
                filesys {
                        name "/"
                        partition "wd0a"
                        size 100 megabytes
                        offset megabytes 0
                }
        }
}


---
Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>
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