Automated install (again)

[Roger Pau Monne <roger.pau%citrix.com@localhost>]

Hello,

I saw there was a post about having something similar to Debian FAI on
NetBSD, and I'm really interested in that feature. I will explain a
little bit the reason why this feature would be useful in my case.

The Xen.org project has a test system, to assure that each change
committed doesn't break anything. The test system performs automatic
installs of several Linux distributions on bare metal, and tests Xen on
them. Since the number of physical machines is probably lower than the
number of OSes to test, and we always want to perform a clean install
before we start testing, the hosts are installed automatically and
without user interaction (usually by passing a file that contains the
answers to the questions asked by the installer).

Adding NetBSD to this test system will help finding bugs much more
faster, and prevent newer features from breaking NetBSD support.

So, to get to the point, is there any chance to have such a feature
added to sysinst?

I've done a quick look at the code, and it seems it won't be really
difficult to load a file and fill all the necessary global variables
from there, after having all the necessary information it's just a
matter of calling all the functions, md_pre_disklabel, write_disklabel,
and so on... Maybe someone more familiar with sysinst has a better
option about that.

Thanks, Roger.