Subject: Re: another sysinst thought
To: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
From: Simon Burge <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 12/18/2004 00:25:43
der Mouse wrote:

> I recently had occasion to do an install onto a rather slow machine.
> Based on that, it occurs to me that it might be a good idea to make
> sysinst capable of handling uncompressed tarballs, for use on machnes
> where it's quicker to load uncompressed stuff over the net than it is
> to load compressed stuff and uncompress it locally.
> 
> Of course, since I'm not volunteering to do it.... :-/

One quick idea is to pass -f to zcat (or have GZIP=-f in the environment
if sysinst is calling pax/tar/whatever directly).  This will make zcat
to cat uncompressed files.  Then on your server you can uncompress the
sets and rename them back to .tgz before you fetch them.

You could even do "GZIP=-f ./sysinst" right now without any code changes
to play with this.

I'm not suggesting that this is the right solution though, but it's less
coding :-)

Simon.
--
Simon Burge                            <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
NetBSD Support and Service:         http://www.wasabisystems.com/