On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:00:00 +0100 Thomas Bächler <thomas@archlinux.org> wrote:
Dan McGee schrieb:
On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 10:05 AM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter@plaetinck.be> wrote:
quickinst: http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=installer.git;a=blob;f=quickinst;h=23e41ccb... Is there anyone who actually uses this? If so, can you tell me why?
It's stated quickinst is meant for people who want to mkfs/mount their filesystems themselves, okay I understand that. But, as a "consequence" you can only install the base packages, your keyboard/time/.. settings don't go into /mnt/etc/rc.conf automatically, you need to install the bootloader manually (which means having to mount some things yourself, chroot etc.
What is the advantage of this over just using the normal installer and skipping the steps you don't want to do?
Because the normal installer is a manual process. You can't easily do a remote install on 30 machines with a dialog-based installer, while with quickinst that becomes quite easy.
I never used it, but I imagine that is its purpose.
Dieter, didn't your original AIF design say that you can do automatic installations as well? Can you provide a quickinst equivalent based on AIF? If so, it can replace quickinst.
That's correct. The automatic procedure is not ready for use, but it's being worked on as we speak :) So, quickinst is a means to get a basic system with very low interactivity (though partitioning etc still needs to be taken care of manually). Well, first of all scratch my idea of implementing a partial procedure for package installation, it wouldn't offer much added value over a plain "pacman -S --root /mnt --config ..." Instead I'll just continue to work on the automatic procedure. The way I think it should work is like this: (invocation: explanation) * aif -p automatic: do the sort-of equivalent of quickinst. (this is actually more a side effect then a design goal) if no separate filesystem in mounted on /mnt bail out. I don't think I'll bother to allow passing things like ftp/packages path/.. through command line arguments. unless maybe if i have enough spare letters :) One thing that I think would be useful to pass as commandline argument is a block device (eg -aif -p automatic -<something> /dev/sda), which would setup /dev/sda in a default layout (like autoprepare but with values pre-filled in) * aif -p automatic -c /path/to/configfile: the recommended way: you have the ability to specify partitioning/filesystems/package lists/hostname etc in a config file format which i'll try to keep as simple as possible. that, and the ability to define custom hooks and whatnot to implement custom logic in your config We could also deliver one or more simple sample configs, that should compensate the lack of commandline arguments in the first method of invocation. (think of at least a sample config that contains some clearly documented variables such as ftp/cd, location of target system,.. basically the variables which you can pass to quickinst now ;-) Dieter PS: an example of a config file for the automatic procedure: http://github.com/Dieterbe/aif/blob/71f5510aaaa20ae5ae9c773dca12028bd96aafdf...