On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Herb Peyerl wrote:

> First, it was non-obvious to him that there was an ftp client
> provided by the bootstrap package, that he could use to do passive
> ftp.  I call that "duh, look in the tar package and see what you
> got."  but onwards.

Why did he need to know this? While it might be useful, presumably he
managed to obtain the bootstrap package somehow, and so wouldn't block on
trying to obtain any other files. Also, anything that pkgsrc needs will be
fetched using said ftp client anyway.

> Second, it didn't occur to him that he was supposed to use 'bmake'. The
> docs say he needs a C compiler which he installed. It goes over that
> part carefully, but never mentions 'bmake' for building packages. Again,
> completely obvious to me, but not a non-netbsd experienced person.

I'm fairly sure this is covered in the documentation *somewhere*, but I
can't remember where.

It should be mentioned in the above page.

> Third, it didn't appear to say anywhere that the first thing he
> needs to do was go into pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkg_install and build that.
> He was having problems with not having a current libtool, and there
> didn't seem to be one in the bootstrap package, and he seemed to
> have trouble building it, so I got him to 'bmake' in pkg_install and
> he seemed to be able to progress from there.

That step shouldn't really be necessary. And as with NetBSD, pkgsrc should
spit out a message saying exactly what needs doing as soon as you try to
build anything without the latest pkg_install anyway.

This should probably be documented as a worthwhile step, but the
underlying problem should also be fixed.

> Unfortunately, I wasn't typing or even present during any of this, just
> the recipient of some questions that I thought he should have been
> able to get the answers to from the docs.

Thanks for passing this on.

-- 
Gillette - the best a man can forget