this is an unrelated change?

Says so in the commit message; I can split it out any time.

Says so in the commit message; I can split it out any time.

Oh, so it does - I missed that. I'd suggest committing this part separately now; it LGTM.

This seems like an annoying waste of time, at least for when it's called by scripts/auto?

It stays for a blip and at least when doing interactive you get some kind of feedback and not just silently to the next menu wondering what happened (as can happen a lot in our installer and is rather annoying if you come to it as a not-used-to-it-user). Do we have "versions" to not call this for "auto" as in no using ${DIALOG} but something which skips this automatically for non-interactive versions?

Will do. Thanks.

I mean for the interactive version. I don't want to have to say ok to something that is expected to be the case a lot of the time. If someone explicitly selects it from finalconfig then sure, pop up a message saying there's nothing to do, but if all I want to do is install FreeBSD I don't want to be bombarded by things I don't need to know.

It's an INFOBOX which doesn't have buttons. Ever tried to run that command by hand and see what happens?

dialog --backtitle "FOO" --infobox "BAR" 0 0

I don't keep the details of all the various (bsd)dialog boxes in my head. But fine, it doesn't require user input. Doesn't that then mean it flashes and disappears when the next step (Add User Accounts) pops up a dialog? That is, it's almost entirely useless, unless you have a very slow serial connection?

I managed to see and read it when running the installer in bhyve at least on the serial console. Indeed.
But any feedback is still better than no feedback as a user will wonder "what the bleep did happen" and our installer is already as userfriendly as the jokes there.

As I asked, if there's a way to skip it in auto/scripted installs I'll do that to save you the 27ms but otherwise you keep changing your point as you go and need it seems and I keep repeating myself.

I changed my point because you explained I had misunderstood what the code was doing. That doesn't mean I can't have a problem with both scenarios... I don't see why you have to respond to my technical objections by attacking me personally.

Regardless, my point is, if you want this dialog to exist so the user actually knows what's happening, I would suggest using --pause to make the time it's displayed on screen independent of how long it takes the system to exit this script and display the next dialog.

How many seconds do you suggest to wait for someone to read the message who doesn't know what's coming?

I'd suggest maybe 5-10s, with a more complete dialog:

		${DIALOG} --title "${title}" --backtitle "${btitle}" \
		    --nocancel --pause "No firmware to install, continuing..." 0 0 5

That should be more than enough time to read those few words without being unnecessarily long, at least to me.

Missing --title "$DIALOG_TITLE"

Thank you!