Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

[Rob Lytle]

Hi All,

My depressing analysis- YMMV. I've used FreeBSD since 1998.

1..Installing the packages off of the menu on the 3 CDROMs is an incredibly
tedious miserable process.  I had to switch out the CD's around 40 times.
If you don't believe me, just mark a whole bunch of random packages after
obtaining the 7.0 release CD's, ad then install.  Its frustrating and almost
like Windows, except its a bit faster as replacing CD's is faster than
reboots.

2.  When installing any given package, if a dependency is already there ,
the  package aborts and then goes though some loop where you have to press
OK half a dozen times.  Thats insane.

I think the CD switching problem would be to install all the packages at
once from CD1, then CD2, then CD3.  As for the second case, I don't know
enough about the infrastructure to suggest any thing except to perhaps
comment that code in its entirety or put in  switch to bypass already
installed dependencies.

I wish I knew more about  your infrastructure to fix this myself.  Is it
written in Python?  Thats the only language I'm not so rusty at.  I've
programmed in 5 languages, but that was long ago.  I'm old.  But someone who
knows the system could probably fix it fast.  I think this is such an
inherent infrastructure problem that has existed so long that a bug report
would be futile.

Food for thought.  Thanks,

Rob


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