>Actually, from what I've seen, there's been a lot of bitching and
>moaning that sysinst is an odd combination of a band-aid and a crutch.
>I think if we could move away from sysinst as anything more than a
>nice UI which called the pkg* tools, we'd be a darn sight closer to
>a very nice, very _clean_ install.

This fits in very nicely with my original philosophy for sysinst ...

"If a program exists that does a job, just run that program, don't
put the functionality in sysinst."

So if the pkg_* tools could easily unload the distributions sets,
sysinst would need only to call pkg_add to do the job.  It does look
like that pkg_add would need a new flag to provide the root directory
of the install tree for sysinst's use.  The current "-p prefix"
changes the idea of where to install in the full tree and overrides
the precomputed prefix.  sysinst would want to keep the standard
/usr/pkg prefix (or whatever the prefix was) but put that relative to
the /mnt directory.  (I've already run into this problem in my arm32
cloning procedures and had to use chroot to get pkg_add to work
correctly for me.  In this case, I had already populated a complete
base system and needed only to add packages.  This wouldn't work if
one needed to extract a "base" package into an empty tree.)

-- 
Phil Nelson
phil@steelhead.cs.wwu.edu (NetBSD/pc532 machine)
phil@cs.wwu.edu (work)
http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil