Installer RC2 w/ DragonFly RC2

[Chris Pressey]

On Thu, 08 Jul 2004 21:22:45 +0200
Ivan Voras <ivoras at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> This seems a very nice and mature release - I think it's ready for
> 1.0.
>
> Some notes (non-critical):
> - The twirling baton is a very nice touch :)
> - The configure options at the end of the installation are nice. Not a
> biggie, but if you have the time, could you please "predict" the home 
> directory for the user as "/home/$username"?

Doesn't it, if you leave it blank per the instructions on that form?
(Same thing applies to login group and uid IIRC.)

> - UI request: that the install program remembers on which option the 
> user was before he activated it (e.g. if I chose "configure NIC", that
> after I'm finished with the dialog that pops up, it remains the
> selected option in the old dialog window)
> - there's still no "disk available/used" notification in the partition
> editor, and no lower limit on partition size, but it seems that it
> won't be made any time soon

As you might have guessed, these sorts of changes are harder, because
they involve a change to the UI protocol, and they're implemented
differently (sometimes radically differently) in different UI frontends.
So we're delaying these sorts of changes until we can concentrate fully
once again on the UI layer.  That said, we DO plan to address these, as
they could only help usability.  Right now, however - well, if our
yardstick is sysinstall with it's libdialog interface, I think we've got
enough of a margin on it that *hopefully* most users will forgive the
minor annoyance in the meantime :)

> - Cycling the installation (starting the installation again after it
> was finished, without reboot) fails on disklabel: "ioctl DIOCSDINFO:
> open partition would move or shrink"

This is probably because: you created a swap subpartition on your new
system, the swap subpartition was mounted (swapon'ed) during the install
process (to help ensure that the installer doesn't run out of memory,)
and DragonFly doesn't yet support swapoff.

Most likely, if you install a system without a swap subpartition, you'll
be able to install again and again without rebooting.

However, thanks for pointing this out, as we do have a slightly
friendlier error message in the code for when this happens, but
apparently it's not invoked in all the right place(s)...

> The overall impression is very good!

Thanks again for the compliment and the report :)

-Chris