Re: offline install of perl

> On Jul 12, 2022, at 1:06 PM, Ryan Richter <ryan@2solnu.net> wrote:
> 
> I have a machine with a fresh install of freebsd 13.1 which will never
> be conected to the internet.  I need to install perl on it (nothing
> else), but I can only transfer files by usb drive from linux machines.
> 
> This seems like a simple thing, but I've been looking at documentation
> for a long time now and I can't find anything.  pkg looks relevant, but
> it is not actually installed, and anyway I can't find the url of any
> perl 5 package for 13.1 (the pkg servers seems to have directory
> listings disabled).
> 
> If anyone could direct me toward a simple way to do this I would
> appreciate it very much.

Some sort of pkg-web machine would sure be useful, especially because you have the issue of dependency resolution.

What I’d do, personally, is spin up a quickie FreeBSD vm somewhere, run “pkg install perl5” and then grab everything that pkg drops into the /var/cache/pkg, as that would cover all the dependencies as well.

Note that that should also get you a copy of the pkg installable itself, with which to bootstrap pkg.

In the “old days” of FreeBSD cdroms disc2 was what had all this stuff, but I see no disc2 images in the FTP site. That said, DVD1 may still have some of that, though, and should be *fairly* install-complete for a common language like perl. (That said, it’s up to the user to figure out how to use those on an already-installed system, the old sysinstall tool was better for doing post-install configuration than BSDinstall is).

-Dan