Re: sysinst split project - The Configuration File

[matthew sporleder <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Silas Silva <silasdb%gmail.com@localhost> 
wrote:
> 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.
>

Couldn't you save yourself some trouble by using a property list (
proplib(3) ) as the format?