help with making DVD install disc

[Ian Smith]

In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 605, Issue 5, Message: 5
On Thu, 07 Jan 2016 10:07:09 -1000 al plant <noc at hdk5.net> wrote:
 >  Aloha List, 

Aloha Al,

I noticed in the archives that this seemed unanswered ..

 > I need to make a .iso dvd 11 to test hardware. How do I locate a i386 
 > copy like below with a dvd designation instead of disc1 or has 
 > something changed since I did this a while ago?
 >
 >  FreeBSD-11.0-CURRENT-i386-20160106-r293245-disc1.iso <https://pub.allbsd.org/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/11.0/FreeBSD-11.0-CURRENT-i386-20160106-r293245-disc1.iso>   
 > 
 > I looked at handbook but couldnt find the how to for this. See the 
 > dvd under releases but I want to test 11 for this email desktop 
 > hardware.

The package set on the dvds is only rolled just before release time, 
when the odds of it being a consistent set are at least reasonable.

I guess you could use 10.2-RELEASE dvd, then upgrade system sources with 
svnlite or svnup, though already you need online access to do that.  You 
_might_ even get away with replacing base.txz and kernel.txz with 
CURRENT ones on a re-rolled 10.2 dvd, but I wouldn't bet on it ..

Even with 10.2, there's a dance to be performed to get around bugs in 
bsdinstall and/or bsdconfig regarding finding the packages on the dvd; 
the procedure required is given in the release notes.

We're not where 1GB memsticks were big anymore, and there are now plenty 
of notebooks and tablets without optical drives; I really don't know why 
there isn't a (say) 4GB memstick image with what's on the dvd, and room 
to even add more packages .. I had a go at that for 9.3 but ran into the 
same issues getting pkg pointing to the local packages, before the 10.2 
method was documented.  Even now, not everyone is always online :)

cheers, Ian