At 02:31 AM 2/6/00 -0800, Todd Whitesel wrote:
>  3. sysinst. the main things it needs in order to kick ass are:
>    a. Farm out the format/partition stuff to its own program. This is
>	useful by itself for non-system disk setup, and gets 99% of the
>	arch dependent sysinst code out of sysinst! We should make it as
>	trivial as possible to get a barebones sysinst running on new arch's.

Hear hear! I often boot up with a floppy and run sysinst just to format the
disk, because I don't want to bother figuring out the geometry for a
disklabel.

>    c. Improve FTP install to stream directly into pax, thus removing the
>	need for local disk to hold tarballs during install. If this worked,
>	I bet NFS install would instantly become expendable.

Possibly NFS could become expendable for *sysinst install*, but I believe
we should always have NFS on the install floppy (or have another floppy
image containing it that is always a part of the release). I also quite
often boot with the install floppy, NFS-mount the filesystems of a running
system, and tar a snapshot of the existing machine through a pipe to the
new machine; this gives me all the already-installed packages, which is
very convenient. Don't think I can do that with ftp.