Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>  wrote:
 > On 13-Jul-98 Charles M. Hannum spoke unto us all:
 > #  Consider what happens when I give Joe Random a CD.  They install
 > #  NetBSD.  Now say they want to install `sudo'.  *Where* do they look?
 > 
 > I've been investigating doing something about this.. but I really have nothing
 > solid planned.  Mainly I was thinking of extending sysinst to be more
 > smit-like, and have it possible to install pkgs from there directly.  This
 > right now.. is totally emryonic.. I'm not sure I'll have time for it even..

sorry to jump in the middle. I just sub'd because of our other idea....

I'm seeing in my head (besides all the usual things), an expandable tree
like structure similar to what is I think the Solaris pkg stuff where you
can visually select an entire category or click on a box to have it expand
to sub-categories down to the leaf nodes and you can select individual
packages. If you select a package that has a dependancy, it gets selected
also... Then we could have a 'search' mechanism whereby you could type in
a search string like 'sudo' and have that category expanded and highlighted
(but not selected)... 

Then we have the super-packages in there as well and they just enable their
dependencies... The someone could, say, select both 'web-server' and 
'news-server'...

of course, I'm assuming some sort of X-based install utility though it
could be done in curses I spose...

mmmmm, armchair programming... my favourite.