Install Log

[Matthew Dillon]

    Ok, well even though I am responding to the first message in this
    chain I did read through all the other responses and, generally
    speaking, there was a lot of good information there.

    I really don't want to put the sources on the release ISO, for many
    reasons which I will iterate.

	* Any sources will become instantly obsolete the day they are
	  released.

	* They are 385MB (81MB gzip'd).  I really want to keep the ISO
	  distribution as small as possible.  The ISO is currently
	  85MB compressed, so adding 81MB of compressed sources would 
	  double its size for no benefit to most of the people downloading
	  it.

	* Anyone who can download the release can also download the sources.
	  This is certainly not entirely true for people who get the release
	  on a mailed CD, but it is again a matter of the vast majority of
	  people having access to the internet.

	* I want DragonFly to be small enough to fit on other people's
	  multi-session CD's (I don't want our official dist to itself
	  be multi-session).  This would not prevent you from creating your
	  own multi-session CD, however, since DragonFly has no problems
	  recognizing such CDs.

	* I want there to be plenty of room on the CD for future enhancements,
	  such as e.g. including X, UI environments, and possibly even
	  UI applications.

    Now I completely understand bootstrapping issues... getting the machine
    working well enough to get access to the internet in the first place :-)
    Which is why we have tried to make the releases as flexible as possible.

    I think this is more a matter of education then anything else.  It is
    true that sources would give you the ultimate in flexibility, but it
    would only be incrementally better then what you get on the release CD
    already.  

    As it stands now, you can in fact just login as 'root' after booting the
    release CD and kldload whatever additional modules you need to get your
    network up and running before you relogin as installer.  You can 
    interrupt the boot sequence to set boot environment variables when
    necessary, and in the next release you will even be able to work around
    interrupt routing issues with boot env variables to force interrupt
    polling.  The real issue here is that we need to beef up our
    accessible documentation so new users can figure out how to do all this
    stuff.

    fdisk is a sore spot.  Even I have problems using it.  I would love to
    find a replacement.  But sources won't solve the fdisk problem.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>