Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

[Sean Cavanaugh]

> Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 11:23:48 -0700
> From: jan6146 at gmail.com
> To: freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org; freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> CC: 
> Subject: Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years
> 
> 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,


This is the reason I install everything from ports.

The packages were divided into understandable clusters to make them fit on CDs. Perhaps you would benefit from getting the DVD ISO instead which has everything together. Im sure someone on the list could provide you the link for it or google for it.

-Sean