On 25 July 2015 11:09:36 PM AEST, lee <[email protected]> wrote: >Matthew Marchese <[email protected]> writes: > >> Hi all, >> >> I see that you've found stager. I'd like you to share your thoughts >on >> what a perfect installer Gentoo could do. > >The Debian installer is the best one I've seen so far. > >If you're thinking towards Redhat, the Fedora installer can't even do >partitioning, and the Centos 7 one was just the like. They suck >horribly, and they don't give you choices.
In my opinion, there's really 3 parts to the install process, and I think it helps to distinguish between them. I think a complete installer program has to address all 3, but each task could be modularised. 1. The low level decisions, like disk partitioning, raid and disk mirroring, filesystem choices like ext4, btrfs, zfs, or some other. For a VM, the choices here might include creating a new LVM volume or btrfs subvolume 2. Installing system files, which is not much more than untaring the stage3, and low level system configuration of make.conf settings, choice of profile, locale & timezone settings, users & passwords, networking, choice of syslog & from, etc 3. Higher level system configuration to get to a finalised state (Of course, there's quite a bit of blurring between the stages.) I'm not so interested in 1, but gentoo really shines here because there are no restrictions. But there are so many options that it makes it a big task to tackle, unless you pare it down and focus on a few typical use cases like a standard desktop install Part 2 is where it would be good to have a standardised approach, along the lines of debian's debootstrap utility. Something that takes a target directory and installs all the files needed to build a bare-bones system inside it. Its actually not that difficult to write a shell script to achieve this, which is probably why there are so many posted around the interests. But something standardised could be the basis of a gui installer, or the center of a container installer such as the lxc-gentoo script or whatever the docker equivalent is. The 3rd task is more in the realm of tools such as ansible or puppet. > > >Having that said, and having done few Gentoo installations: I'm merely >wishing installing Gentoo wasn't such a lengthy process. It's lengthy >in that you have to do the steps manually while browsing the excellent >handbook. > >If there was an installer that would guide you through these steps and >bring up the files you need to edit in an editor, that could save a lot >of time already. It could reduce the possibility for error, as in >overlooking that you need to do some step. Which is what part 2 is about. I started writing my own installer based on using ebuild files for the configuration. But I like your idea of an interactive mode for configuration. > >Otoh, I have to come to like how Gentoo is installed. You can do >whatever you like, and the process is pretty straightforward. I don't >see how an installer could give you that, yet a perfect installer would >need to. And that is the difficulty inherent in a gentoo installer... If its too restrictive, its not really gentoo anymore; if its flexible to cover all the options, you may as well just stick with typing commands in a shell... > > >How about support for booting from ZFS? I'd really like to see that; >it >should be as easy as booting from other file systems. Without it, we >have to do ugly things. -- :b
