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Re: Reworking sysinst, 2nd



Julian Fagir (gnrp%komkon2.de@localhost) @ Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:18:11 +0200 
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> unfortunately, the recent sysinst rewrite ceased.
> But there are features current sysinst is missing, and which are
> complicated to implement (that is, gpt, raid, cgd modifying). The
> questions is: What to do about them?
> I've been thinking about this quite a long time...

I'm planning to implement this ideas in GSoC - proposal will be 
written pretty soon.

> So I'd like to propose writing a new installer. Not completely from
> scratch, there's too much information in the old installer, but write
> a new backend and provide the md parts of current sysinst as modules
> (though that is much work to rewrite).
> 
> The other way would be to maintain compatibility and use another
> installer. OpenBSD's install script is not worth maintaining
> compatibility (as there's no interface). FreeBSD's bsdinstall(8) is
> imho too unflexible wrt different interfaces.
> bsdinstaller.org seems just right, but I didn't look that closely at
> it. It seemed very complex, more than what I would think about being
> needed, but perhaps there's somebody here who knows more about it?

That's looks like sensible idea: sysinst have some disadvantages, but
it is worth to remember that sysinst checked by time and it's just
work. Strong changes may create large number of new problems, also it's
should be implement many platform-depends things.
If the community is interested and there will be a mentor I'm ready to
do this work as part of my GSoC (also i'm planning to create additional
boot images for USB, LiveCD/USB, may be all-in-one).

> I also think taking a deep look at bsdinstaller should be done before
> any wheel is invented a second time in another language.

As far as I know bsdinstall isn't support gpt, raid, lmv, cgd. But
bsdinstall looks like good candidate to be ported for NetBSD.

Regards, Eugene

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