Hi,

it appears that sysinst on i386 is still broken after the changes I
recently committed, and I won't have any more time this week (or
coming weekend) to work on it, so here's a brief overview of the
recent changes, the current show-stopper, and what I think should
(at a minimum) be done to sysinst.

The recent changes were:

 o in run.c, default rows / cols to 24 x 80 if TIOCGWINSIZE
   returned 0 x 0 (as it did on a pccons INSTALL kernel).

   I've tried a wscons/vt100 INSTALL kernel, which is a little
   less than 40K larger, and on that kernel it returns 25x80.
   For comparison, here's the sizes of the INSTALL kernels:

   # size netbsd.*
   text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
   1495008 1695744 139328  3330080 32d020  netbsd.pccons
   1527776 1695744 140552  3364072 3354e8  netbsd.wscons_sun
   1531872 1699840 137620  3369332 336974  netbsd.wscons_vt100

 o In preparation to switch to wscons in the INSTALL kernel, I
   added a new termcap.mini file in distrib/i386/floppies/ramdisk
   which contains a vt100 termcap definition.  I've not yet
   committed the changes to the INSTALL* config files.
   distrib/i386/floppies/ramdisk/list similarly updated.

 o the new sysinst really wants some pseudo-ttys, but
   etc/etc.i386/MAKEDEV didn't create any under the "ramdisk"
   entry.  It does now.  (It caused all external commands to fail,
   with no good error message being displayed.)


The current show-stopper in the installation is that sysinst does
not appear to mount the newly created file systems under /mnt, thus
causing a disk overflow when the install sets are transferred (in my
case via ftp).  I rummaged a bit around in the sysinst code, but it
was not obvious why this was (not) happening.  Again, no error
message was given why it failed to mount (if it even tried...).


A few things I really, REALLY wish would be fixed in sysinst are the
following (OK, the first one is the most important):

 o The current sysinst is IMHO way too insistent on manual
   interaction during the installation.  Requiring a keystroke for
   each "user-visible" command that is executed is, um... "highly
   undesirable".

   Instead, what I would like to see is a single scrollable window
   which can be looked at at any time (via some key combination)
   which contains both the commands executed and their output.

 o It would be really nice if all the commands executed during the
   installation could be saved to a file (if it can't already?  I
   must admit I've not tried the logging options/functions yet -- no
   need to tempt fate quite yet ;-).  This file could then be used
   to build special-purpose install images which could perhaps be
   used to automate installation of NetBSD on multiple identical
   systems.

Regards,

- H=E5vard