[arch-general] Arch Linux automatic (prescripted) installer/deployment tool

[Dieter Plaetinck]

Hi all,
I've started working on a new procedure for AIF called 'automatic'.
With automatic I don't mean a newbfriendly installer that automatically 
configures your xorg etc.
I rather mean an installer that you pass a small configfile (disk 
layout, package list,...) so it can work non-interactively to setup your 
system exacty the way you want.

I hope I/we can someday implement such automatic installation in two ways:
- an environment that gets loaded through by pxe booting and can work 
without any user input at all.
  Best case scenario we can generate such an environment like we 
generate cd iso's, and we automatically start aif with the automatic 
procedure.
  A sufficient live network config will be done (the bios will use dhcp 
before pxe booting) and the config file for the procedure can be made 
available for example by the user himself who generated the pxe environment.
  (low prio for me personally but maybe someone is interested in this, 
it's something to keep in mind)
- we use the installer cd with AIF on it, you boot it and start "aif -p 
automatic" yourself. 2 more manual things need to happen:
  * Network config (for that I plan to write a simple script that uses 
the aif libraries)
  * getting the config file for the automatic procedure
  After that, the automatic procedure can work independently.


Given the modular, reusable code base we already have now, this should 
be fairly easy to implement (although I still need to work more on aif, 
the way pacman functions are exposed etc)

Does anyone have thoughts, ideas, requirements, ...?

Dieter