Currently the Caiman architecture supports two types
of installers - a LiveCD based GUI and AI. Each of
these installation environments are different in that
one is a desktop based environment while the other is
not. As a result, they are both built on a different
set of packages with AI being built on a significantly
smaller set.
As we provide more installation environments in the future
(text based interactive install, a media based AI and possibly a
network based text install), I think there are a couple
of high order issues that need to be sorted out.
a) What kind of an image should these new installers
(text, media based AI) be based on? Since both these
installers are not going to offer a desktop installation
environment, does it make sense to base them on the
same set of packages as AI? I think it would be a
reasonable starting point.
b) Assuming some of these installers get delivered as
part of the same AI image, how should the selection
between which installer to use be made? The two obvious
choices are to provide them via the GRUB menu or as a
separate menu item that comes up as part of boot (kind of
like the keyboard and language selection menu in the
current LiveCD installer). I think one of the underlying
requirement here is to allow this to be scriptable. Also,
a consistent user experience on both sparc and x86 would
be nice. A separate menu items seems better on both counts.
c) AI and the LiveCD currently share the implementation
for the live-fs-root SMF method and it has been pointed
out that that's not very maintainable. The addition
of more installers to the mix, I think just exacerbates
the problems. It seems appropriate to restructure
live-fs-root as part of the media based AI and text install
work. Or, can be done as part of a bug fix? For example -
http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=9549
What do people think about some of these issues?
Thanks,
Alok
