Making world but no kernel

Michal Varga varga.michal at gmail.com
Tue Jul 26 15:19:31 UTC 2011


On Tue, 2011-07-26 at 16:28 +0200, Jerome Herman wrote:

> > PS: Whatever that means, please don't get your sources through
> > "sysinstall", that monster shouldn't even be present in a seriously
> > maintained FreeBSD installation. Get your sources "the proper way" with
> > csup:
> >
> > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html
> >
> > (note - "csup", not "cvsup", it's explained on the page in detail)
> 
> Well since I am not upgrading, but just making sure things are where 
> they should be I figured that sysinstall was OK for the job.
> Any problems with sysinstall ? I have been quite happy with it in the 
> 10+ years I have been using FreeBSD.
> 

Well, that depends. Probably every single time I've seen someone
touching sysinstal in a post-install environment, that OS was instantly
rendered as much as good for a complete reinstall. It's just "one of
those things" that shouldn't be present in any rescue scenario.

Anyway - I can't comment on the specific procedure you're going to
employ through sysinstall as I haven't even physically seen that thing
for years (and as far as I know, it has been finally nuked from orbit
for the upcoming FreeBSD 9 release), but it wasn't even being actively
developed for those past 10 years you mention (I might be exaggerating a
bit, but it has been a well known fact for years that sysinstall is an
unmaintained rotting mess, which in turn recently led to it being
finally replaced).

Using csup was just an advice to make yourself perfectly sure about the
outcome. It's very easy to point your supfile to -

*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_8_2

(that's the vanilla release I understand you need to rebuild)

- and be 100% sure about what's going to happen and what sources you're
going to get. Upgrading or not, that plays no role in this scenario, as
csup is just a way of getting a specific source tree, no matter how
you're going to use it later.

Basically, I wouldn't trust sysinstall with installing FreeBSD for a
start, and surely not with a recovery procedure where you have exactly 0
tries left in case you fail. So I'm just pointing that out.

m.


-- 
Michal Varga,
Stonehenge (Gmail account)




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