I have a barely-customized 1.3.2 system installed a couple weeks ago, but
due to problems with the sysinst program (not yet investigated how much of
it was my fault vs. limitations of sysinst) I had to abort sysinst after
the newfs phase and manually extracted all of the i386 distribution
tarballs into /.

First issue: pkgsrc and xsrc didn't automatically put themselves inside /usr,
and overflowed my (purposely chosen small) 23 meg root partition. The fix was
simple but (I think) could not easily be done inside sysinst:
	cd /
	mkdir usr/pkgsrc ; ln -s usr/pkgsrc .
	mkdir usr/xsrc ; ln -s usr/xsrc .
	mkdir usr/var ; ln -s usr/var .		# probably not really required

Next I went about extracting lots of useful looking packages. Since I was
using tar and not pkg_add, everything was sensitive to the current directory,
and in some cases neither / nor /usr were appropriate; at least one package
wanted to see 'man' in the extraction directory, so I kludged yet again:
	cd /usr
	ln -s share/man .
This let me use /usr for all my extractions.

Did I flat out botch my installation by extracting everything myself?

Onward.

Last night I discovered the mozilla package (joy!!) on netbsd.org and brought
that over. I also started using pkg_add to unpack things like lesstif and xmcd
(which doesn't like my Mitsumi FX140S, it lists the FX140S2, but that's less
important than getting mozilla running).

Whenever I use pkg_add I also get warnings that it couldn't record the package
contents in /var, "You're on your own!"  How nasty is that?

Lastly, the mozilla-19980603 i386 binary mostly works, but it spews lots of
assertion messages into its terminal and pops up lots of assertion dialogs.
The real showstopper however is that resizing the window (or starting it with
-geom 800x800 as I like to do) guarantees a prompt SEGV.

Now, I am already planning to flush and reinstall my system this weekend. Is
the above description sufficient for someone to pass me a few clue cards, or
am I just going to have to be more religious about using sysinst and pkg_add?

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com