On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:

> I have a 486 with a small hard drive (under 1 GB) and 32 MB ram.  
> 
> I can successfully install and set up NetBSD but I would like to add a
> few binary packages to the install.  I'm on dialup (2 KB/s).
> 
> Do I have to install the whole pkgsrc tarball to do it?

No.

> I ran out of time last night to see if the base ftp client can resume an
> interrupted download.

See ftp's:

	    -R          Restart all non-proxied auto-fetches.

(and "reget" and "mreget" for interactive ftp).

> Does pkg_add have any facility to permit interrupted installs of binary
> packages?  My phone line is unreliable and may also be needed for normal
> phone use.

I'd suggest that you download the packages a head of time first (using ftp 
for example).

(I have a script I use for that if you want to test.)

> Is there a way to get pkg_add to give a preview of how much disk space
> will be used by a package and all upon which it depends;
> 
> 	and how big the download is;
> 
> 	and perhaps the list of files it needs to get in case it would
> 	be easier to download the tarballs on another box and transfer
> 	them via scp?

The download sites have a pkg_summary.gz file that contains this info. 
See pkg_summary man page too.

Look for FILE_SIZE= and DEPENDS=

> The packages I'm interested in are:
> 
> mc (midnight commander)
> lynx
> python
> vim with python syntax

One example using my tool:

# pkg_get depends mc 
glib2-2.12.12 depends on perl>=5.0 (perl-5.8.8nb4 is installed)
mc-4.6.1nb3 depends on glib2>=2.8.6nb1
mc-4.6.1nb3 depends on libslang>=1.4.9nb4
mc-4.6.1nb3 depends on perl>=5.0 (perl-5.8.8nb4 is installed)
mc-4.6.1nb3 depends on unzip-[0-9]*

I am not sure how to handle python with my tool though.

  Jeremy C. Reed