>Hope this isn't politically incorrect of me, but...
>
>It seems to me that a large portion of this work has already been
>done.  Why don't we just take the FreeBSD install stuff and work it
>over so it works on NetBSD?  Maybe abstract out the right parts so
>they'll work nicely on any architecture.

I did that once, the porting part at least.  I eventually discarded most
of my work, though sysinstall did make a pretty-looking disk partitioner.

Problems:  It required ncurses, it used ridiculous highlight colors that
created a nice 3D effect on syscons but looked terrible on pccons, it
used a poorly-documented and poorly-written GPL'ed library ("libdialog"),
and it was so i386-specific as to be essentially useless on any other port.

I decided it would really be easier to just write a small curses-based
program to deal with the disk partitioning, get X to run from the CD,
and eventually redo the whole thing in Tk.  Of course, I never got around
to doing a great deal of this stuff.

I was impressed by the amount of work that had obviously gone into the
FreeBSD install process, but mortified by some of the design choices.  I
have very similar feelings about their package tools, and frankly I wish
they hadn't become a defacto NetBSD standard.

In my copious free time, I would like to remedy some of these situations
one of these days.