coming from thread "Re: FreeBSD Mall now BSDCentral"...
At 4:30 PM -0400 7/10/01, Bill Moran wrote:
>*sigh* this has gotten way off track somehow. Looking back, I'm
>probably primarily to blame.
>
>The fact is: *I* *AM* interested in replacing or helping out with
>an effort to replace/improve sysinstall. However, there are two
>critical things I must understand if I am to do anything truely
>productive along this line:
>
>1. Should sysinstall be fixed or replaced.
>2. What needs done to fix or improve sysinstall.
>
>Now, I've gotten several excellent suggestions with regard to #2.
>If any of my replies to these seem like arguments, then that's
>just a part of my inability to communicate, as what I'm trying to
>do is *understand* what exactly needs done. If I only change what
>*I* want, it might not be terribly useful overall (as can be seen
>by my divergence from other's opinions) You make an excellent point
>of this in your second paragraph below.
>
>What I was really interested in getting answered was #1, as it
>was suggested by Terry Lambert that "sysinstall must go" (don't
>remember his exact words) I have no desire to start repairing
>something if a complete replacement is in order.
>
>The fact of the matter is that I don't understand the problem
>enough to fix it. It may seem strange to people that I'm more
>interested in understanding this problem than in fixing problems
>that I already understand. Well, I always have been a little
>strange ...
>
>Personally, I would appreciate it if folks would *not* back
>off from this conversation, since I'm actually beginning to
>understand, thanks to the tireless efforts of many who already
>understand.
I am inclined to say "replace sysinstall", just because it has
so many quirks in it's user-interface which have annoyed me.
On the other hand, I do want something a lot like sysinstall,
and maybe if enough of the little things got fixed up then I
might not be so eager to have it completely replaced.
Part of the install process is the disk-partitioning step, which
is more of an issue with fdisk and disklabel than sysinstall.
Every time I go to use those I end up hitting something I don't
particularly like, although the specifics of what I dislike are
different each time. Eventually I get it to do exactly what I
want it to do, at which point I try to put the whole experience
out of my mind... :-)
The one (silly, trivial) thing that I *like* about Openbsd's
disk-partitioning setup is that I say "I want about 50 meg for
this partition", and it automatically rounds up to the nearest
"even boundary". It figures out the next-largest number of
sectors such that no disk space is wasted. Yes, I realize it's
a 20-gig disk now, but it still annoys me when I see "800 sectors
unusable" for each partition I create.
I like the recent change so the partition-size can be displayed
in sectors vs Kilobytes vs Megabytes (we may soon have to add
Gigabytes to that!). It would also be nice to have percentage
as display option there.
I create several different partitions, and inevitably I get to
the end and realize some partition is too large or too small.
What I'd like to do at that point is say "just take partition
<x>, and increase it by 20 meg", and have it move all the
partitions after it to match that. Instead, I end up having to
delete all the partitions down to the one I want to change, and
then recreate them all.
I very much like the recent change so you can turn on the
softupdates flag for a partition when you are creating it.
However, there is some kind of column-counting mistake there,
such that if you are creating more than one columns-worth of
partitions, then turning on the softupdates flag for a partition
in the second column writes past column 80 on the screen (which
is to say, it writes on the first character of the following row).
I know there are other things which have annoyed me when I've
gone to use the disk editor, but I'm afraid I have not written
them down anywhere, and those are the only things that I remember
off the top of my head.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message