Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: NetBSD System Packages
To: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU>
From: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 09/29/1998 22:24:05
Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU> writes:

>I suspect that this will be insufficient - and perhaps surprisingly, also
>much harder to implement than a much more general solution.

[general solution follows]

Sounds OK to me.

But this whole question was thrashed to death on the developers' list
around April, as a kind of postmortem on sysinst and 1.3.0.

One of the _really_ important consensus items that we came to then is
that the install tools should, by default, DTRT for the naive user.
Sure, we can add bells and whistles for experienced users or those
setting up diskless/dataless machines, but that shouldn't be the default.

The default should be more like selecting sets, or even between
""install base system or base + X11?", and then Just Do It, assuming
diskful, single-host installation.

By all means have a menu option that turns on more options (NFS vs
diskless vs diskful, or {/, /usr, /usr/share, ..}  prefix-by-prefix,
but dont make the naive user jump through those hoops.