> installation possible).  That was the biggest problem I had with the
> RedHat installer for linux (especially a problem with frequently full
> MkLinux mirrors).

Ditto on that. Though I was using monolithic linux-pmac.

> Screen 3l: choose disk from which to install
> Screen 3n: set up networking and nfs info
> Screen 3f: set up networking and ftp info

You'll have to deal with HFS installs via something like hfsutils and
don't forget to let folks install from mountable partitions as well.
 
> Install NetBSD... this would either extract tarballs from local drives,
> from an NFS source, or download them -- hopefully in *smaller pieces* from
> an ftp site.

Here here on the smaller pieces. I've always felt base.tgz always had alot
of extra baloney in it. There's nothing more annoying than watching 99.9%
of a base install to a zip take a little while and then have the installer
spend 10 hours trying to install the timezone file for every city in the
known universe. How many people really need the timezone files for the
Antarctic bases? ;-)

In any case it would be nice to have better control over what packages are
installed. The "base" file should be *extremly* small. Like one meg. No more
"big chunks" like we have now. Packages should be in more digestible pieces.
We should also use pkginstall if possible.

> circumstances, w/o modification.  After modifying that, if you choose, it
> would then do the tar extractions (or whatever replaces tar in some future
> release), write out an /etc/fstab file on the new setup based on the mount
> information you fed it earlier, and finally, if we were really ambitious,
> use hfsutils to write a new booter preferences file with the SCSI ID
> changed... but probably not.)

Don't forget to build devices! :)

> Thoughts?

Sounds good so far. Its nice to see somebody taking on the task. It's tricky
to write an installer. You want good functionality but you have to be
careful to cram it into a small package. Remember, folks have to miniroot
boot this so they have to fit the kernel, the installer, and the rest of the
miniroot image in memory. Never mind having enough RAM left to run the
extraction tools. Some folks want to install on machines with as little as
5 megs of RAM!