From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Nov 29 14:46:50 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id OAA24964 for questions-outgoing; Sat, 29 Nov 1997 14:46:50 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions) Received: from cygnet.camelot.com (cygnet.camelot.com [192.55.203.137] (may be forged)) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id OAA24958 for ; Sat, 29 Nov 1997 14:46:44 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cjohnson@camelot.com) Received: from localhost (cjohnson@localhost) by cygnet.camelot.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA14760 for ; Sat, 29 Nov 1997 17:57:51 -0500 (EST) Date: Sat, 29 Nov 1997 17:57:51 -0500 (EST) From: "Christopher T. Johnson" To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Req feedback re: change in pkg_add and sysinstall Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I must say that I really enjoy the "ports" and "packages" that FreeBSD uses. There is one place where the user interface could be a little bit better, maybe there is something in the documentation that would help that I've missed but the problem is: How do you know what the name of the package is? Right now, the process I go through for installing a package looks something like: cd /usr/ports make search key=kermit pkg_add -v ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/packages-2.2.5/All/kermit-6.0.192.tgz wait for the failure because while kermit is a port, it is not a package. cd comms/kermit make make install make package Install package on the 8 or 9 other machines that need that package. Looking through the source for pkg_add, I don't see anyplace where you can set an enviornment variable or where it reads from a configuration file as to where to get packages over the network. So the two things I'm looking for are: 1) a config file or environment variable for pkg_add which will give a default base URL 2) that sysinstall would install INDEX into /var/db/pkg to allow for easy searchs. Thanks, Chris P.S. if (1) sounds like a good Idea, I'll submit diffs for it later this week.