Hello everyone, My name is Zach Wegner. I am 20 years old, and I attend Austin Community College in Austin, TX. I have been selected for the Google Summer of Code to help out the NetBSD project. I've been using NetBSD for several years, and I am excited to become a part of the community. My project is based on a suggestion by Tim Rightnour, who is also my mentor. It is to create a file format that can fully specify an installation, and then split sysinst into a front and back end that communicate through the file. I.e., you run sysinst with something like the current interface, but instead of installing, it only creates the file and then runs the back end once it is done. I am very glad to be doing this project, and I hope that it succeeds in its goals. I have discussed some various ideas for the project with Tim, as well as some other NetBSD guys within the Google application page. It seems that sysinst is a very volatile subject, and I must stress that I have both limited time and limited abilities. It is beyond the scope of the project to completely rewrite sysinst, so most of the code will have to remain the same. One subject discussed on my application is language. Apparently many people would like sysinst to be in a language other than C. While some of the arguments make sense, I just can't do that. So sorry about that in advance. The most important part of this project is the file format. What I am wanting in this format is to be easily readable and editable by humans, as well as being very flexible. Because of this, I think it would be best to use a very simple, sh script-like format. I have an example file that I set up: http://www.geocities.com/zwegner/sysinst.SAMPLE.conf.html There are some missing parts, and I have since noticed that the slashes are kind of ambiguous, being used for options and directories. I'm thinking of maybe replacing the option slashes with ?s. If anybody has any really serious, super-critical reason that this format is bad, or any little suggestions about the finer points of the syntax, please say so. But again, I don't have the time to implement a very complicated parser, and I think the sample format should handle the task well, so I'd prefer that we don't have a flamewar over this. I also have some little add-ons that I might be able to add if I get any time. I'll just write them down here, so that people don't suggest them again. -Supporting customized sets -Supporting lists of pkgsrc packages to be installed after the main installation -Cleaning up the front end to make it a bit more user friendly -Making a type of conditional logic available, where statements in the configuration file could give instructions like "Install the GENERIC_MP kernel if there is more than one processor" or "Install the GENERIC_TINY kernel if there is less than 10GB disk space". If there are any other suggestions for extras, feel free. I probably won't get a chance to do much, but all of them can be done afterwards, possibly by me. This project will need some help from others, in particular platform-specific testing and menu translation. I will contact this list when the time comes. So in conclusion, this is a pretty basic but important project. The configuration file will be usable for a long time to come, and people can write brand new front ends and back ends in whatever language they choose, interfacing them through the file. I hope I don't sound snobby or inflexible; I am just a student doing a summer project though. But anyways, I am looking forward to being a part of your community for the summer and a long time after that. Zach