I was scratching my head tonight, trying to come up with a general design
for the installer, i.e. what capabilities it should have, how it should be
organized, etc. and came up with this.  It borrows some ideas from RedHat
that seemed reasonable.  At any pont, hitting escape would take you to the
main menu (maybe).  One notable difference is that I don't think there
should be any modal dialog boxes during the install.  Failure to install a
piece should result in a message on the screen in a status bar, and it
should reattempt the install until you cancel it (making unattended
installation possible).  That was the biggest problem I had with the
RedHat installer for linux (especially a problem with frequently full
MkLinux mirrors).

Here is a quick preliminary map of screens in order that they'd appear.
I'd like to get some opinions now, while the whole idea is little more
than an idea.


Screen 1: Type of install, e.g. update or install (irrelevant for now)
Screen 2: Install source, e.g. local disk, nfs, ftp

Screen 3l: choose disk from which to install
Screen 3n: set up networking and nfs info
Screen 3f: set up networking and ftp info

Screen 4: main menu (it won't look like this, but these are the options
          that come to mind... feel free to add more...)

    MAIN MENU:

    1. partition disk
    2. initialize partitions (mkfs/newfs)
    3. "Install NetBSD" (includes some config screens)
    4. Enter shell
    5. Quit Installer


Partition... probably drops you into pdisk, unless someone can think of a
nice-looking front-end that doesn't impede functionality too much.  This
could alternately be replaced by a convert partitions dialog to convert
MacOS partitions to NetBSD ones, just delete and create, with lots of are
you sure messages.

Initialize partitions... through the wonders of pdisk, this would
basically dump a list of all the NetBSD partitions on any connected disk,
their names, etc.  You'd then put a checkbox or something beside
partitions to initialize.  If you don't select any, none get initialized.

Install NetBSD... this would either extract tarballs from local drives,
from an NFS source, or download them -- hopefully in *smaller pieces* from
an ftp site.  This would initially give you a screen where you'd tell it
where to mount the partitions.  With a little work, it should be smart
enough to set some default values that would work under most
circumstances, w/o modification.  After modifying that, if you choose, it
would then do the tar extractions (or whatever replaces tar in some future
release), write out an /etc/fstab file on the new setup based on the mount
information you fed it earlier, and finally, if we were really ambitious,
use hfsutils to write a new booter preferences file with the SCSI ID
changed... but probably not.)


Thoughts?
David

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