In message <199808270140.LAA10790@mallee.awadi>, Brett Lymn writes:
>According to Perry E. Metzger:
>>
>>I really believe that system install should be doing much less "parse
>>boot messages" and far more "use C to walk the device tree and extract 
>>information".
>
>A hearty hear hear to this!!! Parsing boot messages only really works
>reliably just after boot which is ok for sysinst but sucks for any
>longer term tool.

And even then, I've personally had the message buffer get overflowed
by error messages that wouldn't have precluded a successful install,
except that sysinst could no longer extract any useful information.
Getting away from parsing messages would be a good way to go.