new sysinstall

[leimy2k at mac.com]

On Sunday, August 24, 2003, at 3:12 PM, Richard Coleman wrote:

Robert Garrett wrote:
to replay an install, you could just replay the xml data, sent to the 
packages back. fully customized install scripts would be very easy to 
create. Packages could be built for ports that integrate fully with 
the cm utility. so for once and for all managing a huge number of
opensource boxes wouldn't be a complete nightmare.
I like the idea of using xml data to replay the build.  You still need 
an infrastructure like Jumpstart (Sun) or Kickstart (Redhat) in which 
to do the initial build (from cd or remote install machine) as well as 
handle the "replay" of the data.  But using xml to structure the 
post-install configuration could simplify the creation of the 
post-install scripts.

I agree... automatic configuration is a good thing... especially if  
you wan to see this
stuff run on clusters, which based on the optimizations being made in 
dfly may be
a really good thing.

Stuff like partition sizes and filesystem types as well as drivers for 
hardware and the like
would be very beneficial.  NFS mount points and basically anything that 
can be
configured in the BSD system is fair game.

Unfortunately, the FreeBSD ports system is too unstructured and gets 
in the way of doing this right.  Too many options for building ports 
are buried in the make options (i.e. make WITH_GTK2=yes, etc).  You 
often have to dig in the Makefile to find them since they are never 
described in the pkg-descr file (pet peeve of mine).  Although I 
primarily use BSD systems, I'm very envious of the package systems of 
most Linux distibutions.

Personally I wouldn't  try to script the ports collection to do 
anything.  It's a meta-software
system and the best anyone can do is control only the metadata.  The 
sites where the
software is stored can go up and down along with people's internet 
connections, which
on a cluster generally doesn't need to exist anyway :).

I would stick to the stuff that is actually burned to the CD's or 
stored in the dragonflyBSD
stuff as is.

This is still a nifty idea :).

Richard Coleman
richardcoleman at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx