DragonFly has an automated installer, called PFI, for “pre-flight installer”. It’s not well-known, and there isn’t a man page to link to for it that I can find. Because of that, I jump at any chance I can get to link documentation or example configs.
5 Replies to “A rare pfi example”
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My understanding is the reason historical Unix, such as the original release 6 and 7 versions from Bell Labs, had man pages for every program is because man pages were required before the program was included in the release. It seems apparent that similar rules concerning man pages are still needed for modern open-source projects.
I think it’s a good rule… but it’s hard to tell when a man page applies if it isn’t a classical single binary being added. i.e. it’s obvious that ‘ls’ or ‘ping’ should have a corresponding man page, but pfi does not have a single program to run.
Not saying it’s impossible; noting that this is less well-defined than R6/R7 programs.
man has sections 7 and 8 for such topics as pfi and bsdinstaller, not to mention that the pfi.conf is a file that can be easily added to section 5!
I guess it was a third party effort and one of the guys who wrote the bsdinstaller also wrote the pfi program. That’s why there is no manpage. The originator is DFBSD but I guess none of the FBSD forks that use bsdinstaller don’t have a manpage for it or for pfi. Wikis were the rave back then and my guess is that the autors provided some documentation on a wiki.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150513123527/http://www.bsdinstaller.org/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150205013304/http://bsdinstaller.org/about.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150204231100/http://bsdinstaller.org/errata.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20110103065005/http://wiki.bsdinstaller.com/wikka.php?wakka=PreFlightInstaller
Good sleuthing – that does explain it. Do you want to create a patch adding a man page? That would be very useful for everyone.
BTW: There are examples for pfi.conf that can be found on the live/installer CD in /etc/default/pfi.conf.
Caveat: The example given in the issue report (#3147) can only be used once the patch in this issue report has been accepted and merged.
I think it would be a good idea to create a man page for pfi.conf and installer. So if/when this issue report makes any progress i will make sure to create one.