Infinite loop in menus in sysinstall

[Ben Kaduk]

On 11/18/07, Kris Kennaway <kris at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Ben Kaduk wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I finally broke down and pulled out the 7.0-beta2 iso for my dell inspiron 8500,
> > but when I was at the part of the installation procedure to install the ports
> > collection, it comes up with the message:
> >
> > Unable to get packages/INDEX file from selected media.
> >
> > This may be because the packages collection is not available
> > on the distribution media you've chose, most likely an FTP site
> > without the packages collection mirrored.  Please verify that
> > your media, or your path to the media, is correct and try again.
> >
> > [OK]
> >
> >
> > It is true that I am installing over ftp from ftp5.freebsd.org (which
> > is only about
> > five blocks away in the real world!), and it certainly seems to not have
> > a 7-INDEX floating around, but that's not the main issue.
> >
> > When I select ``OK'', it seems to try again, and pops up the same message.
> > It would be nice to have an option to back up in the menus and change
> > something; at the moment, I broke to vt4 and installed the perl5.8 port
> > so that I can build my own index file, but I don't know if this will break me
> > out of my menu loop.
> >
> > No time to investigate and patch at the moment, as I'm trying to
> > get the ppc beta iso to boot on the machine I'm typing this on,
> > as I said I would test a couple things (I said this several months
> > ago, and only rebooted once since then).
> >
> > Anyone else see this behavior?
>
> It is expected that betas are not able to find the package sets because
> they are not present in the packages-7.0-release/ directory yet.  Maybe
> sysinstall should be changed to look in packages-7-stable/ until the
> packages are ready late in the release cycle.

Of course -- we don't build packages for beta releases :)

>
> Also giving a way to back out of the loop would be nice, as you say :)
>

Actually, it seems that the loop is not quite infinite -- after clicking OK
a sufficient number of times, I got back to a menu that could actually
do things.

These errors appeared when I was attempting to install the ports collection;
I believe that some X-related ports did not get created (? hard to
find a good term) through sysinstall, but a quick csup insured that I
had the entire ports collection available.

Now, of course, I have to actually build all the ports I use, which
will be a while --
Xorg was ~6 hours on my 4 year old P4.

Still, a cancel option would be nice.  Is it worth filing a PR?

-Ben Kaduk