On Mon, 13 Apr 1998, David A. Gatwood wrote:

> 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...)

Would this be a NetBSD-side or MacOS-side installer?

If it's on the NetBSD, take a look at the sysinst utility. There's no
mac68k port yet, but it's working for i386, pmax, and more.

It's the chosen NetBSD-side util. Trying to do something different will
probably get a lot of friction. However, making sysinst work more towards
what you want (with all ports benifiting, if possible) would be
appreciated. :-)

It's already got ftp, nfs, and local drive support.

Take care,

Bill