Hi, > > 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. for me, the main disadvantage of sysinst is its incapability of being modified, and several comfort options simply not available because of sysinst's design - a "back" button, handling more than one disk, enabling automated installations. I wonder if you can add that to sysinst without rewriting the whole code or making it write-only. That you'd have to write new modules for the subsystems and md parts of NetBSD is right - but you wouldn't have to rewrite the UI - you would get gtk, qt, cgi and curses for free (curses should be looked at, they wrote ncurses on their website). Imho, problems about disk partitioning and other disk utilities could be addressed in another way: By introducing a unified scheme for tool usability. Currently, it's a hell to partition disks in NetBSD, especially for beginners. If you want a disklabel, you have to deal with fdisk(8) and disklabel(8) (both with a different ui). If you want a gpt, you have to deal with gpt(8) (completely different usage to fdisk and disklabel) and dkctl(8), which is very complicated for a beginner to use, or even to understand. That's something that should be improved imho anyway. And once you did that, you could as well have only a single small module in sysinst dealing with partitioning. I just think that unifying that scheme and adding that to (a new) installer is only slightly more work than adding gpt to sysinst with all the logic of gpt(8) duplicated. Regards, Julian
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