Re: 5.2-RC1 impresiions

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003, Artem 'Zazoobr' Ignatiev wrote:

> My old hdd just went down, so I had to reinstall freebsd completely from
> the scratch second time for a three years on my home box, via ftp. 
> 
> Impression one: dynamic root. I've got a habbit of doing 'cd /etc; for i
> in syslog.conf rc.conf ttys; do ed $i; done' in fixit console during the
> install process once /bin had been settled down. Whoops - with dynamic
> root one must wait for /lib to come up

How early did you try it; if you waited a few minutes did it "start
working" or is the problem that the symlinks don't get populated until
after the contents of the disk have gone <splat>.

> Impression two: pkg_add. It is in base system. Trying to bring system to
> multiuser run-level ASAP, i've choosed to install only bin and catman
> distros. Trying to do 'pkg_add -r bash' resulted in ld-elf trapping
> without libssl.so.3 (ha, ldd tells me that it requires also libcrypto). 
> So I must say, installing only bin distributions leads to inconsistent
> system. pkg_add(1) either must be compiled without cryptostuff (if
> possible), or there must be some other solution.

Our base distributions are becoming more and more interconnected as the
assumption of availability (and need) for crypto becomes stronger.  I'm
not sure what the right answer is, other than to start simply requiring
the crypto libraries.  pkg_add is using crypto to support signature
verification for packages: that's something we could make "pluggable" in
which case pkg_add could report the lack of support if the plugin wasn't
available, and the plugin could be installed as part of the crypto
distribution.

> Impression three (Implied from impression two):  'Do you want to visit
> main menu...'? Of course, I do. I need sshd and ssh, and working
> pkg_add. So I go to distributions, select the crypto distribution, go to
> top level - and sysinstall runs from the very beginning. Hey, I've
> downloaded bin distribution, and catman, and I don't want to download
> them once more (and pay for them twice, in particular). 
> 
> Just thinking, whether it worth filling a PR... 

Did you select "distributions" from the "post-install configuration menu" 
or the top level menu?  It could be that sysinstall isn't clearing its
"distributions to install" mask when the install completes (bug), or it
could be it would if you were at the right menu (feature). 

Thanks,

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert_at_fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research