Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 09:04:14 +1000 (EST) From: Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au> To: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Release schedule for 2.2.7 Message-ID: <199806232304.JAA11350@gsms01.alcatel.com.au>
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On Tue, 23 Jun 1998 21:50:39 +0200, Stefan Eggers <seggers@semyam.dinoco.de> wrote:
>I think I'll look into the sysinstall source either this week or the
>next and try to find a way to incorporate size estimations in its
>output
This would be great.
I can see the following difficulties:
1) Pre-requisites.
Currently they are handled automatically (ie any pre-requisite
packages are automatically loaded). This is a good thing. The
problem is, how to we indicate to the user that by selecting this
package, he also pulls in a variety of other pre-requisite packages?
As an example (probably close to the worst case): mxv-1.10 itself
needs about 780k of disk space. Its pre-requisite is iv-3.1 - another
7152k. How do we tell the user that if he doesn't need InterViews for
other reasons, mxv is 8M (which he may think is excessive), whereas
if he needs InterViews anyway, mxv is <800k?
My suggested layout below includes one way of handling this.
2) Filesystem layout.
It's probably a reasonable assumption that all the packages go into
/usr (if they include any files in /, those files are of negligible
size). This implies that the package size could be a single number
representing the amount of /usr space needed.
The problem is that within /usr, x11-related packages appear to be
almost randomly split between /usr/X11R6 and /usr/local. Most (all?)
other packages go into /usr/local. What if the user has decided to
split /usr to put (eg) X11R6 into a different partition?
I can't think of any simple solution to this, except to warn affected
users that they can't rely on the allocation of occupied space to
their partitioning. This should not be an issue for novice users
because they will (in general, hopefully) have used the automatic
partitioning, which gives them a single /usr.
>If someone has a good idea where I could place sizes on the screen
I would suggest that each package line include the size of the package
(excluding pre-requisites) before the ports directory, and a new line be
added which displays total free space in /usr, total selected packages
(including pre-requisites) and remaining free space (maybe as the top
line on the screen). This would result in a screen layout of:
===============================================================================
Space: 123456K available, 21456K selected, 102000K remaining
+----------------------------- audio ------------------------------+
| Audio utilities - most require a supported sound card. |
| +--------------------------------------------------------------+ |
| | [ ] amp-0.7.6 1234k [/usr/ports/audio/amp] | |
| | [X] cam-1.02 2307K [/usr/ports/audio/cam] | |
...
| | [ ] rosegarden-2.0.1 10.1M [/usr/ports/audio/rosegarden] | |
| +-----v(+)-----------------------------------------------------+ |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| [ OK ] Cancel |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+
another mp3 player
===============================================================================
[Note that the sizes are all random numbers].
The top line should carry across the `Package Selection', `Package group'
(as shown above) and `Package Targets' (the `are you sure' window) windows.
It would be nice if there was a way to get all the dependencies (together
with an `already installed' flag) displayed for a given package (eg by
pressing `F1' or `?'). This would help the user understand why selecting
a box marked `780k' causes the `selected' number at the top of the screen
to increase by 8M (to use my mxv example from above).
>how you think it should look when it finally lists all packages (just
>before it starts to install them) and asks if that list is OK that
>would be helpful.
Similar to the selection layout above - add the package size before the
ports directory. It would be useful if this list included all the
automatically selected pre-requisites (which I don't think it currently
does), together with a flag to indicate that these selections were
implied by the user's selections.
Peter
--
Peter Jeremy (VK2PJ) peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au
Alcatel Australia Limited
41 Mandible St Phone: +61 2 9690 5019
ALEXANDRIA NSW 2015 Fax: +61 2 9690 5247
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