Current plans for FAI. was Re: PCMCIA support in FAI?

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Thu, 1 Aug 2002 21:57:17 +0200, "Michael Renner" <michael.renner at gmx.de> said:

    >> My abused version of FAI (which instead of an nfsroot uses a
    >> bootable CD and configuration floppy) implements an initrd.
    >>
    >> http://search.alphanet.ch/~schaefer/FAI/

    > Thomas, do you plan to include this into a later version of FAI?

Hi all,

currently FAI is not changing because of summer vacation. I also have a
lot of thing to do for organizing the linux kongress, which will take
place in cologne in september.

My next plan for FAI is to make it more modular. Henning Glawe showed
how to split FAI into more packages, one for the clients, one for the
nfsroot, and also to create a doc and server package. I also had the
idea to split FAI but I will not create that many packages.

I just created the first beta version of fclass (a good program name
?), which implements the function of the defclass() subroutine, but is
independent of FAI. So I can use it for my Solaris 9 automatic
installation. The next thing is to apply some minor patches that all
of you send to me. Then FAI will be splitted in two or three
packages. But there are a lot of open questions, how to split FAI.

I like to include the scripts for creating a bootable CD into the FAI
package. But Michael's scripts (and some other patches, extensions
from other people) are far away from including them into FAI. I will
apply patches to FAI or include extensions, after I looked at the
source code. That can take a lot of time for me. It's very important
that patches or extensions also modify the documentation. Without
documentation, no extension will go into FAI !  There are also some
quick and dirty hacks that work for a certain environment, but will
not work in a general way (fixed IP addresses are bad, Michael).

All this does not mean, that I will not accept any code from other
people, but it should be well written and documented. It's a good idea
to contact be before writing new code. Maybe I'm also working on it or
I'm just going to modify an important part of FAI (I received three
different patches for reiserfs support for setup_harddisks).

-- 
Gruss Thomas