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Date:      Sat, 8 Apr 1995 22:50:01 -0700
From:      uhclem%nemesis@fw.ast.com
To:        freebsd-bugs
Subject:   bin/308: Do-it-yourself FTP needs to prompt for what to download FDIV001
Message-ID:  <199504090550.WAA03910@freefall.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of Sun, 9 Apr 95 00:43 CDT <m0rxpmp-0004voC@nemesis.lonestar.org>

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>Number:         308
>Category:       bin
>Synopsis:       Do-it-yourself FTP needs to prompt for what to download FDIV001
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs (FreeBSD bugs mailing list)
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Sat Apr  8 22:50:01 1995
>Originator:     Frank Durda IV
>Organization:
>Release:        FreeBSD 2.0.0-SNAP950322 i386
>Environment:

Occurs in SNAP-021095
Still occurs in SNAP-032295

>Description:

[FDIV001]

During the installation, if you specify that you want to do your own FTP
commands and have selected more than one distribution (bin, src, etc), FTP
is invoked repeatedly to download each module separately (normal), but
nothing is displayed to indicate which module the install expects you to
download now.   You are simply dropped-into FTP without instruction.

I determined (the hard way) that it doesn't want all the distributions
downloaded at once.  I found out only when it came back from processing
just bin and started FTP again, apparently wanting more files.  But which?
Even if I pretended that the distributions were there already, it would fail
due to filename conflicts (see below).   The bin distribution also had
trouble because the CKSUMS file from later distributions replaced the
the CKSUMS file for the bin distribution.

It is possible for the user to guess what he/she is supposed to download
using FTP, but if they download the wrong thing in the wrong order (I did
this several times), the installation sometimes does not catch the error
and the installation goes on its merry way with unknown results.  Once I
determined it was asking for stuff in the order that the checked boxes
were listed, I wrote that order down and on the next install attempt I
was able to supply things in the expected order.


>How-To-Repeat:

Run install with the download-it-yourself via FTP option and ask
for multiple distributions.   To see the second half of the problem
after the bin is extracted, reply No to the question about deleting
/usr/tmp.   WARNING, Answering Yes to that question makes subsequent
downloads impossible!  (Another bug will be filed on this point.)


>Fix:
	
This is a Suggestion:

Before invoking FTP each time in this manual mode, display a prompt such as

	"Now download all files in the 'src' distribution"

so the user will know exactly what to get.  When wanting compat1x (as an
example), the prompt would say: 

	"Now download all files in the 'compat1x' distribution"
etc.

Longer term, I also suggest putting a prefix of some sort on files with
common names, such as CKSUMS (src.CKSUMS) so that if the user elects to keep
the files around (the installation does offer that choice), the conflicting
names won't render the already-downloaded files useless.  Right now,
the CKSUMS for bin (and other files) are lost after downloading the next
distribution, and you never have the opportunity to make separate
directories to put the different distributions in.  

Another alternative would be to do the downloads into subdirectories 
below /usr/tmp (or the directory that the user specifies) so that the
filenames won't conflict (and be overwritten) and they can still be
deleted if the user wants to.  The subdirectories could have the names
of the distributions, such as %s/src, %s/bin, %s/compat1x, etc.

*END*

>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted:





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