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.
1. Don't use the MSDOSFS code for accessing FreeBSD distribution data.
Use Robert Nordier's stand-alone DOS I/O library for the purpose.
It this works as well as Robert says it does, it should drastically reduce
(or even eliminate) our "I can't install from my DOS partition!" calls.
2. As a result of the above, go to stdio file descriptors for all
media types.
3. Taking advantage of #2, start using libftpio for FTP transfers instead
of maintaining our own parallel version of the FTP transfer code.
Yay! I ripped something out for a change!
#1 Submitted-By: Robert Nordier <rnordier@iafrica.com>
and the user inserts a floppy), read the config file to pre-define variables
for a custom installation.
[Note: I fixed one bug in LOAD_CONFIG_FILE code, but it's still not perfect.]
in one place, leaking memory in another).
Add a facility to invoke subsystems directly by naming them on
sysinstall's command-line when running post-install. A replacement
for pkg_manage might, for example, be `/stand/sysinstall configPackages'
Fix bogon where upgrade shell was entered with tty modes spammed.
Fix bug with release name checking in ftp_strat. Turned a bunch of
bogus exit()s into proper calls to systemShutdown().
1. Use new dialog menu hacks (no strings, just arrays of dialogMenuItem structs)
so that I can create composite menus with radio/checkbox/... items in them,
removing some long-standing UI bogons in various menus. This work isn't
finished yet, but will be done in two phases. This is phase one.
2. Remove all the script installation stuff. I never got time to document it,
it was arcane and it just complicated much of the code. There are better
ways of doing this if I want to do auto-driven installations later.
3. Remove much dead code and otherwise attempt to remove as much historical
grot as possible so that this code is easier to hack on. This is also
a two-stage process, phase one of which is now complete.
This looks like it was developed offline, and is being spammed over the
top of the existing. "That's fine by me! I dont really care how you do
it, just get it in there..." said Jordan in a conversation a short while
ago...
1. Fix a few bugs in the ftp installation code and implement proper
ftp and network shutdown routines.
2. Clean up the menus a fair bit - add a FreeBSD configuration menu.
3. Eliminate the last of the "chaining" - the installation now does
the most obvious thing in the most obvious cases and doesn't present
you with more menus than you were expecting. This makes it necessary to be
a little more explicit in places, but it's still less confusing.
4. Add a few more safety nets for the user. Change a few hard-and-fast
limits to warnings (it now runs as non-root, Bruce).
5. Add descriptions for all the supported ethernet cards.
6. Make the cpio floppy extract put up a menu requesting the drive you wish
to use if you have more than one; don't just always assume drive A.
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).
