The automated installer uses three kinds of manifests as of 09/06 release. They are sysmap (or criteria) manifest, install (or AI) manifest and system configuration manifest. The purpose of these manifests are as follows:
The install manifest is an XML document that defines the client installation. It contains disk target, partition and slice operations, IPS repository selection etc. The SC manifest or system configuration manifest contains the information needed to configure the system after installation is completed. This contains IP address, user account, time zone etc. The criteria manifest associate the AI manifest and the SC manifest with a client. The 09/06 release provides a default manifest for each service. The users can add custom manifests and associate a client based on MAC address, IP address, memory, and architecture. Jack worked on the manifest inter-file functional specification. The discussion about criteria manifest helped us to realize that it is very complicated and difficult to understand. I would like to propose removing criteria manifest from AI and keep only install manifest and SC manifest for the following reasons: - The client specific setup is done in two places. First to associate a service, the user needs to do 'installadm create-client' and to associate a manifest, the user needs to add a custom manifest with MAC address of the client as the criteria. We can combine service and manifest association in one command if the criteria manifest is removed from the manifest. - Removing criteria manifest reduces the type of manifests the user needs to manage from three manifests to two manifests and improve user experience with AI One potential disadvantage is that the proposal will remove some functionality. Currently the users can use different criteria other than MAC address or combine multiple criteria to customize the environment. This feature is not used by many because of the complexity of setting up custom manifests. The derived manifests can be used in some of those cases. Please send your feedback about the proposal. Thanks, Sundar
