On Sat, 20 Jul 2002, Hauke Fath wrote:

> At 10:31 Uhr -0500 20.7.2002, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> >On Sat, 20 Jul 2002, Hauke Fath wrote:
>
> The etcupdate/postinstall combo is vastly superior to what sysinst offers
> and incompatible with the latter. As I said, the INSTALL document of the
> 20020706 snapshot does not mention it at all, and postinstall for all its
> beauty and power is undocumented other than by its source and folklore on
> current-users.

Yes, running "etcupdate/postinstall" should be on the list of things
for "sysinstall" to do -- in lieu of moving "/etc" to "/etc.old",
agreed. The last time we were in release mode, "etcupdate" did not
exist, so it's understandable that it's not in "sysinstall" yet.

> >While most of the problems you point out are valid (and they all look
> >fixable), I think your overall assessment is overly harsh.
>
> Due to these valid problems, I needed ~15 sysinst runs to get the upgrade
> done. And it is not even the first time I went through this. 'Overly harsh?'

That's pretty bad. I never had to do it more than 4 or 5 times. :-)

> >I could never get used to the old Mac OS installer
>
> The MacOS installer is irrelevant for this discussion - I haven't even
> mentioned it.

But it was the supported way that "sysinstall" replaced, so it is
relevant to the question of what the recommended procedure in INSTALL*
should be (since it sounded like you were suggesting that the INSTALL*
docs be reverted).

> I am not talking about new installs, either. I am talking about the sysinst
> upgrade procedure, only. While new installs have been just as problematic
> for me in the past, at least there is no danger of trashing existing data
> (unless sysinst trashes the wrong partition, that is...).

I believe that's fixed, and I'd like to thank Bob Nestor for pushing
through and getting the fix in time for NetBSD 1.6. [That was my big
complaint with "sysinstall", and now I'm completely sold.]

> [Btw.: I went through this three days ago. Fifteen times, each time kicked
> out with a different trivial error, cleaning up, re-starting from zero. I
> can be pretty stubborn in such cases, and I decided to make sort of a
> project out of it. When did _you_ (or Bob) do your last NetBSD upgrade
> through sysinst? Just curious...]

I've done it three times in the past month or two -- to 1.5ZC, and
1.6A and 1.6D. There's a learning curve. The latest one was absolutely
painless (though as you said, DHCP doesn't fully work, it only gets
half of the information, but it still saves a little typing).

Frederick