sysinst split project - The Configuration File

[Silas Silva <silasdb%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi all!

(I'm Cc'ing this to current-users@, although I don't know if this is
right - if not, tell me so I can e-mail always on tech-install only).

There is a long time I posted my e-mail in tech-install@ about my wish
of beginning the sysinst split project. I believed I could provide an
initial agenda for the project, but I barely could start it (no time!).

My friend (I'll let introduce himself, if he wishes) and I started with
a basic configuration file that we want to discuss with you and, when
there will be some consensus around it, we'll close its specification in
a BNF grammar and we'll start to implement the parser lib in Lex, Yacc
and C.

I posted it here: http://pastebin.com/f5ec7a9f

We've taken a look at the 2008 gsoc project Mark pointed us. There is
interesting things to get from there, but we found its syntax is a bit
confused, so we made the one I linked above. We tried to keep "fields"
there (size, start, FStype) like they show up in classical sysinst.

Please, take a look and make suggestions.

When we get a lib ready for use, we'll start the actual sysinst split.
We don't know yet what will be done, possibly one of the two
possibilities:

- Import Dragonfly BSD installer (which looks very interesting, but IMO,
  has some problems to combine with the philosophy we are adopting for
  the sysinst split project (the existence of a configuration file)).

- Get classical sysinst and split it in backend and frontend, like the
  original proposal and according to the abandoned 2008 gsoc project.

Please, review the sysinst.conf file proposal and tell me what we can do
to make it better.

Thank you very much!

-- 
Silas Silva