On Sat, Nov 27, 1999 at 12:24:14AM -0700, Tim Rightnour wrote:
> 
> 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.

Could be a good idea. But if this was the same program some code could
be avoided (sysinst could call postinst directly with the internal data
structure, no need to know how to write a file).
Having 2 separate programs could allow us to same some space on the boot
floppy, with sysinst pulling postinst from the install media (but this mean
that it's sysinst job to mount the CD or NFS server, or to pull a file
from ftp, and this may be annoying).

For now I would go with a single program, but with 2 really separate area.

> 
> 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.

Interesting idea, should not be hard to inplement.

> 
> 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)

Yes, log window ! This is important (we could use different ttyE with wscons,
but not all ports support wscons yet, unfortunably).

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

I'm not sure we should have the notion of offset here. The install tool
should deal with this by itself.
I can't see any reason why the user would want to hardwire the partition
offsets.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
--