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Subject: Pending crisis in packages/All/...
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 06:59:33 -0700
Message-ID: <13671.813938373@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

Aw foo, I knew it was too simple to be true..

The packages/All directory has proven to be a life saver in
implementing all the chained-add stuff I've been doing for pkg_add
(e.g. pkg_add will now load any dependent packages, via path or URL)
and sysinstall will be using it too for all the package loading it
does.  All/ is nice because it flattens the hierarchy out and saves
you what would otherwise be a lot of annoying searching ("searching"
an FTP server is no fun in particular, let me tell you!) and anyway
it's generally just a handy thing and life would be wonderful except
for one little tiny annoying problem that just occured to me:

	mksiofs can't hack it.

mkisofs breaks badly on a directory containing as many symlinks as the
packages/All directory does, and last time I was not able to get
packages/All on the CDROM because of it.  To not be able to do
auto-package adding off a CDROM would be a bad thing, yet I don't see
any immediate solution.  mkisofs is a real ball of fur that you would
not want to get into, but just in case anyone really feels the urge to
see what it is I'm talking about, you can do it trivially by following
these steps:

	Use mkisofs to create a ISOFS filesystem image of the
	packages/All tree.  Don't ask me for the flags to mkisofs,
	I can't remember all the relevant ones at the moment.  You'll
	find them since they're all kind of non-optional anyway.. :)

	Use vnconfig to point /dev/vn0 at the created image.

	`mount -t cd9660 /dev/vn0 /mnt' or something to that effect.
	You'll see that the Rockridge information for packages/All
	is spammed pretty good and not very usable.


The way I see it, we have a few options:

	1. I can try to find some different mastering software to use
	   and somehow get the FreeBSD distribution trees to a machine
	   that supports it.  Ugh.

	2. Fix mkisofs.  Ugh.

	3. Reshuffle or eliminate packages/All to work around the bug.
	   Ugh.

As you can see, I'm greatly enamoured of all these alternatives.. :-)


Thoughts?

					Jordan