Re: offline install of perl

On 13 July 2022 7:16:59 am AEST, Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org> wrote:
 > On Tue, 12 Jul 2022 16:06:06 -0400
 > 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,
 > 
 > 	This may help:
 > 
 > <https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/215699/how-to-install-and-configure-freebsd-without-internet-access>

G'day Steve,

I  can only say that the process of using bsdconfig's packages menu to install packages from DVD1 (whether as a DVD or memstick) without a network connection, is completely broken on FreeBSD 12.3 ( a currently supported release).

So far I have no clue as to when it last did work .. there seems little interest in (or comprehension of) the notion that not everyone has good internet access.  What 3rd world?

I've spent many days over the last couple of months getting it to work, and I'm in the midst of writing up the 4 patches needed to fix it, with which  I finally got it working to install Xorg, KDE and a few other things recently. Poor health has slowed me down but I'm determined to finish fixing this.

I can't say whether it's been fixed in 13 - I suspect not - without seeing a few relevant files from bsdconfig and a listing of the /packages directory on DVD1.  Specifically:

All (four) *.subr scripts from
/usr/share/bsdconfig/packages

# ls -lrtR ${dvdmountpoint}/packages > dvdpackages.txt

Please contact me offlist if you (or anyone) could help mail me that?


 > > 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).
 > 
 > 	The only way I know is from an online FreeBSD box like this:
 > 
 > $ pkg search -Q url perl5
 > perl5-5.32.1_1
 > Comment        : Practical Extraction and Report Language
 > Pkg URL        :
 > pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:13:amd64/quarterly/All/perl5-5.32.1_1.pkg

That's the one on the 12.3 DVD1, dated Nov 4 2021.

[... rest elided ...]

cheers, Ian