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Date:      Tue, 16 Jun 1998 04:20:51 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        ben@rosengart.com, Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 2.2.6 CD-ROM : Package dependencies up the creek ?
Message-ID:  <v0401171ab1abd9139e5b@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980616013132.2930A-100000@echonyc.com>
References:  <19980616095005.64408@welearn.com.au>

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At 1:38 AM -0400 6/16/98, Snob Art Genre wrote:
>On Tue, 16 Jun 1998, Sue Blake wrote:
>
>> I also took objection to the idea that packages should not be available
>> during installation. That would cut out freebsd's accessibility to a lot
>> of newbies. My one concern was that it sounded like that didn't matter to
>> anyone.
>
> I don't understand why you think "newbies" can't install packages except
> in sysinstall.  Why not put a pointer to pkg_manage in the default
> /etc/motd, or something like that?  Pkg_manage even *looks* like
> sysinstall.

Some packages are useful to have right away.  I've done nearly a dozen
reinstalls in the past few days.  The first time I installed every
package which looked remotely interesting, and in hindsight thought
that was stupid.  However, in a later install I installed *none* of
the packages, and immediately regretted that decision too.  I wanted
to create initial accounts with a bash shell, for instance, but that
doesn't work great if you didn't install bash.  And the first thing
after rebooting I ftp a tar-file of various scripts I'm used to using,
but some of them don't work because I don't have perl5 installed yet.

I think it's good to have a short list of "highly desirable" packages
in a list right at install time, but leave the full list for after
the user gets past that first reboot.  And by having an initial short
list, we could perhaps make sure that all packages on that short list
are on the first CD-ROM (the CD a user boots off to do an install).

Just my thoughts, after my first-ever installs of FreeBSD...

---
Garance Alistair Drosehn           =   gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer          or  drosih@rpi.edu
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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