Jordan,

> I guess the bottom line is this: Are you guys firmly set in the
> direction you want to go vis-a-vis installation tools?  I've done 3

I don't know the answer to that.... :-)

If you are interested in having a look at my config managment tool,
you may find it useful.  IMHO it _is_ the framework you spoke of.  The
big advantage of my approach is that your install/setup scripts can be
much simpler because:

*BSD/2.0.5/i386/config.d/S10disk

does not need to know anything about anything but i386 disk
systems... on FreeBSD.
Same goes for

*BSD/1.1/sparc/config.d/S10disk

But newfs'ing and populating the filesystems which is reasonably
generic can be handled by

*BSD/config.d/S20newfs

and the most generic stuff done by

config.d/S*

I've been using this tool to setup SunOS, Solaris and of course NetBSD
systems for some time now. If you run it with the ksh it should also
handle HP-UX ok (/bin/sh too broken).

Anyway, if you are interested check out:

ftp://ftp.quick.com.au/pub/unix/

look for:

cfg-slides.ps.gz	slides for my talk tonight.
config-sh.tar.gz	the tool itself.
configs-example.tar.gz	an example configs tree.

eventually there will also be a configs.ps.gz describing the thing in
more detail.

Note, the above directory is mirrored at:

ftp://ftp.telstra.com.au/mirror/ftp.quick.com.au/unix/

which is on a much faster link, so look there first.

--sjg