at the time, but on further reflection..." bucket with these changes.
1. Checking the media before frobbing the disks was a fine idea, and
I wish it could have worked, but that leads to a rather difficult
situation when you need to mount the media someplace and you're about
to:
a) Chroot away from your present root.
b) Newfs the root to be.
You're basically screwed since there's no place to stick the mount
point where it will be found following the newfs/chroot (and eliminating
the chroot in favor of just using the "root bias" feature would work
great for the distributions but not the pkg_add calls done by the
package installer).
2. Automatic timeout handling. I don't know why, but alarm() frequently
returns no residual even when the alarm didn't go off, which defies
the man page but hey, since when was that so unusual? Take out timeouts
but retain the code which temporarily replaces the SIGINT handler in
favor of a more media-specific handler. This way, at least, if it's hanging
you can at least whap it. I think the timeout code would have been losing
over *really slow* links anyway, so it's probably best that it go.
This should fix NFS, tape & CDROM installs again (serves me right for getting
complacent and using just the FTP installs in my testing).
section was a good thing, since it made it possible to detect media problems
*before* the installation started, but it also caused various things to
be mounted BEFORE the chroot() call, which definitely messes things up.
Fix this by detecting the pre-chroot() case and mounting into a subdir.
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
Some things may still display text on the 24th line, but that's because
they've always been screens designed to fit into a minimal real-estate
and have hardwired assumptions about the dimensions. They'll be a little
harder to make dynamic.
It remains to be seen how successfully. The distribution loading code
is still not here yet, but the partition/newfs/mount/cpio-extract cycle
is as complete as it's ever going to get, modulo possible bug fixes.
The TCP/IP setup screen is also sort of here, albeit in a highly-changing
state due to the fact that per-interface information isn't being kept
right now but is being added (thanks, Gary!).
more to come in the next 24 hours, this is just the first stable result of
8 hours of hacking so far. The specification format for menus is pretty
much hammered out and the beginnings (very humble) of the doc hierarchy
are present for an example. It should be quite easy to add a lot more
menus quickly to this since I did go somewhat out of my way to make the
framework easy to work with. This is NOT the glorious semi-graphical
sysinstall (or whatever its name will be) that the install-geeks are working
on, this is simply the "son of sysinstall" I've been promising to write in
the interim for 2.0.5 and 2.1R (super install doesn't come until 2.2R).
