Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 14:25:26 -0600 From: Kevin Kinsey <kdk@daleco.biz> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr> Subject: Re: Installation instructions for Firefox somewhere? Message-ID: <4220DB36.9020502@daleco.biz> In-Reply-To: <1186281086.20050226154821@wanadoo.fr> References: <20050226130211.4162005f.albi@scii.nl> <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNEEIMFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> <1262756249.20050226141419@wanadoo.fr> <422085C8.8080407@makeworld.com> <1861359872.20050226153635@wanadoo.fr> <42208AFC.6030200@makeworld.com> <1186281086.20050226154821@wanadoo.fr>
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Anthony Atkielski wrote: >Chris writes: > > >>If you don't have the ports tree (/usr/ports) on the box, put it there. >> >> > >I don't have 300 MB to spare, particularly for something that I will use >so rarely. > >What's wrong with getting the index from the FTP site when I run >sysinstall? Seems to me that it would guarantee that the ports are >always up to date. > > Well, I've been under the impression for a while that sysinstall is not necessarily reliable in terms of getting the most current information; not because of its design, necessarily, but because of some details about layout, building world, etc. Keep in mind that this is "my take" on the question, and I'm basically nobody (and will mention that fact again.) A crunched binary version of sysinstall exists in /stand. A couple (or 3?? - I knew this once) of years ago sysinstall was moved to /usr/sbin in -CURRENT and now lives there in the 5.X branch. On a 5.X machine, then, you have two "sysinstalls" that may or may not be the same date, (and most likely aren't) and certainly may vary in some way: [668] Sat 26.Feb.2005 14:14:01 [kadmin@local][~] ll /usr/sbin/sysinstall && ll /stand/sysinstall -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 411336 Feb 12 10:34 /usr/sbin/sysinstall* -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 2148964 Apr 23 2004 /stand/sysinstall* Now consider the following note Murray Stokely writes in /doc/en/articles/releng/ (he's discussing preparatory steps for building a RELEASE): "Sysinstall should be updated to note the number of available ports and the amount of disk space required for the Ports Collection. This information is currently kept in src/release/sysinstall/dist.c." So, it's my best guess (as I said, IANAE) that /usr/sbin/sysinstall will not know about anything later than the date obtained by "uname -a" (last system rebuild, whatever), and /stand/sysinstall may have hoplessly out of date information (unless you are in the habit of crunching new binaries for /stand every time you upgrade the system; most people probably don't<?>). Now, I'm not saying I'm right, because I don't even know the exact procedure you're describing in using sysinstall for "getting the index", but most of my experiences using it to try and do anything in terms of packages/ports seem to indicate that it has basically one idea of where to look, and that idea isn't the newest ports tree. I could be wrong. Kevin Kinsey
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