Making world but no kernel

[Ian Smith]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2011, Chuck Swiger wrote:
 > On Jul 26, 2011, at 8:19 AM, Michal Varga wrote:
 > > 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.
 > 
 > I've been using sysinstall at dozens of customer sites since the 
 > 1990's without ever once running into a problem resembling what 
 > you've described.  Considering the absence of specific details, I 
 > think you're exaggerating well past the point of credibility.

I think so too.  Once I'd learned to use sysinstall post-installation to 
do more or less just one thing at a time - about 10 years ago - I've not 
had a problem; I regularly use it for base installs, often on multiple 
slices on laptops.  Ah that's right, 3.3-RELEASE sysinstall was dodgy :)

 > Anyway, if someone does something bad using sysinstall and needs to 
 > fix it, restoring from backups should be all that is needed.  When 
 > people talk about doing a complete reinstall, it implies to me that 
 > they don't have backups in the first place.

Indeed, but in this case we're talking about reinstalling sources for a 
release version.  I've never seen sysinstall barf at installing sources 
(or packages, for that matter) from CD, net or memstick, and don't see 
how it could be inferior to using csup for the sources, except maybe 
it'd be a good idea to blow away /usr/src first, against any cruft.

Hopefully the new installer will be as useful for multi-booting setups, 
and for installing selected packages etc.  Guess it's time to try 9 ..

cheers, Ian