sounds awesome :D On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter@plaetinck.be>wrote:
Hi all, at first I wanted to make an automated installer for Arch Linux (with scripts that specify all the specific aspects of the system). When starting to build this, I looked at the archboot scripts (/arch/setup and /arch/quickinst on the install cd) and noticed that I could re-use lots of code if it would have been split up more (eg I can't just source the useful functions in /arch/setup, I have to source the whole thing and hence, start the installer).
So I started writing "Fifa: the Flexible Installer Framework for Arch linux" : http://github.com/Dieterbe/fifa
It's designed to be a general, flexible framework for installations. It uses the concepts of 'phases' and 'workers'. There are 4 phases (preparation, basics, system, finish), which can each invoke workers (to get a package list, install packages, install boot loader etc etc). The workers and phases can be overridden by creating profiles. So the whole idea is you can create whatever installation procedure you like (prescripted, autodetection, interactive,...) and you can combine functionality from different profiles and you can reuse lots of code.
Keep it mind it's still very, very early in development. It doesn't work yet, but if you look at the code you'll see the basic ideas (and the code is maybe simpler then the explanation).
Right now I'm still working on better understanding the archboot scripts, refactoring that code to make it reusable and building an automated, prescripted installer for myself. ( Once the basics are working, it should actually be very simple to port the current archboot scripts to this system. )