On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 22:14 -0400, Garrett Wollman wrote: > > <<On Tue, 13 May 2003 18:15:33 -0600, Scott Long <scott_long_at_btc.adaptec.com> said: > > > The miniinst CD is meant to be the bare minimum to install the system > > for those that are bandwidth-challenged. It contains *NO* packages at > > all, including perl5. As many recall, perl5 was removed from the base > > system a year ago and is now solely available as a port/package. > > However, perl5 is still a standard part of the system (as witness the > fact that sysinstall looks for it for most of the canned setups); it's > just delivered as a package now rather than a dist. It should be on > any disc image that has the base system installer bits, or else > sysinstall should learn to do something more sensible when those > particular canned setups are selected (e.g., prompt for additional > media choices). I'm afraid this is interpreting far too much into what sysinstall is or what an extra rolled and differently named distribution media (the above miniinst CD) should contain. The perl software now is a port _only_ (and so can be made a package) and thus is _not_ part of the base system. This has been discussed and decided after long thoughts and weighting all the consequences. This is not any different from all the other "nice to have" but "not essential for a base OS" things like one's favourite shell or regularly running network service or web browser or mail frontend or whatever you can name. Which brings us to the sysinstall parts which "know" about non base components. The XFree86 software, certain desktops (KDE, windowmaker, etc), and the Linux userland parts have been handled like this much longer than perl. The fact that certain ports/packages have been selected by the user (by means of manually choosing from the ports collection or by selecting a canned profile) while the distribution media (the CD or network server one installs from) does not provide the archive file IMO are completely unrelated. Missing archives on the installation media cannot or should not be sysinstall's problem (other than reporting failures encountered after trying to work for the user at this request). If the above situation (knowingly(?) fetching a reduced install media and trying to install software which is not contained on it) is too confusing, I could think of a different approach to prevent this situation: At the moment sysinstall seems to fetch archive files and install them right away. If it would collect all the archive files first (plus recursively resolving dependencies) before installing them all in a second stage it could warn about missing archives before installing the very first one. Of course would this approach raise the space requirements on the destination media. But you would not only catch missing files but corrupted transfers, too. You could even "precharge" the "archive file cache area" (like in the above miniinst scenario or should it be like OpenBSD installs used to be where you manually had to fetch the SSL parts the distro did not ship with). But the more I think about this setup (one had to introduce a caching area for the archives, which does not necessarily have to be on the destination harddisk you are installing to) the more this looks like what is already there: We can already setup a machine with an FTP or HTTP server, put the miniinst or official ISO or roll your own content there, add some package tarballs, and use it as the local install server. Of course clients will notice the errors and mistakes you do when setting up this server machine. :) The real "problem" we are discussing here seems to be too high an expectation -- to expect the miniinst ISO to contain optional packages which it doesn't, and to expect the sysinstall program to cope with non fetchable installation components (do not only think incomplete installation media but think unreadable or corrupt media / file servers, file server outage or lossy links, too!). virtually yours 82D1 9B9C 01DC 4FB4 D7B4 61BE 3F49 4F77 72DE DA76 Gerhard Sittig true | mail -s "get gpg key" Gerhard.Sittig_at_gmx.net -- If you don't understand or are scared by any of the above ask your parents or an adult to help you.Received on Wed May 14 2003 - 01:19:09 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Wed May 19 2021 - 11:37:07 UTC