Dan Armak wrote:
> For many configuration purposes it doesn't matter whether you've actually 
> booted this system or are in a chroot. You can offer to run the 
> configurator/package manager or reboot. (Or even integrate the installer and 
> configurator.) If eg a kernel driver is missing, things won't work but won't 
> be broken either; we just need to suggest to the user that he should reboot.

I think that most of these situations are predictable so the user can be 
well informed of such things. In fact, there's very little that I'm 
aware of that *has* to happen post reboot, but I'm certainly willing to 
learn. :)

> What if any things can't be configured normally when in a fully installed 
> chroot? Kernel drivers we don't provide in the install environment. And of 
> course if the env outside the chroot is eg a live system from another 
> partition, you probably don't want to mess with h/w settings. In most cases 
> though you shouldn't care whether you configure things before or after the 
> first reboot, esp. if you don't actually try to run them.
> 

I suppose things such as certain wireless card modules and the like have 
to be built again the *booted* kernel - that's the kind of situation 
were things can / should be done in post flight. I'm starting to think 
that the post flight operations such as additional package installation 
(say postfix, apache, postgres, etc.) and configuration file 
distribution should be done post reboot. Or maybe there's a post flight 
for pre reboot and post - I don't know. These are excellent questions.

Thanks for the comments.
-- 
Eric Sammer
Gentoo Linux
http://www.gentoo.org