At 09:12 PM 1/10/00 +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>What we should do is ensure that some "important" packages are always
available
>in binary form when a new release comes out, and add pkg support to sysinst
>(or to another tool that would be run from hd instead of floppy). This is
>IMHO the rigth way to go.

I agree with this. As a matter of fact, it may even be nice to further
compartmentalize the current "base" so that someone who wanted could really
get a minimal system. But of course a novice could still just say "base"
and it would install all the sub-packages (think along the lines of option
selection when installing MS-Word or the like - you can just turn the whole
thing on/off, or if you know what you're doing, you can burrow down and
turn subcomponents on/off).

At 10:35 PM 1/10/00 +0100, Feico Dillema wrote:
>[concerning putting a collection of useful things in an "option.tgz" file]

>That would be very
>useful for people  installing NetBSD on many machines from a local
>ftp server, as they can stuff option.tgz (or local.tgz) with whatever 
>they want to install by default on their machines. Or maybe better,
>let it install all tarballs it can find in binary/sets/packages/?

Not disagreeing with any of your ideas, but anyone installing NetBSD on
"many machines from a local ftp server" could almost surely install it much
more quickly without sysinst (well, except for the fact that sysinst
automatically figures out all the disk geometry for you - that's the *only*
thing I ever use sysinst for anymore; otherwise I just mount the
filesystems of a working machine and tar it through a pipe, edit one line
in rc.conf, and reboot. Yeah, I know I get some garbage in /var that I
don't really want, but that's just a detail; and anyway it automatically
gives the new machine all the packages I've installed on the master).