Some Questions Preinstall

neri · 2003-08-11 19:10:40

Hi,

Gyroplast wrote:

Do tell, is it me or do I really need to get off my lazy ass and write The ultimate guide to pacman and friends real soon?

Actually, I think the pacman and makepkg docs are good, if not excellent.
What do you wanna change to make them ultimate?

bye neri

Gyroplast · 2003-08-11 19:28:55

For one, I'm missing all this information we have been collecting here about the makeworld program. It's mentioned here and there, but there is no concise information, heck, not even a manpage available AFAIK.

Besides of that I want to split up the official documentation into an installation guide (which it mostly is, after all) and put all the other stuff (like pacman and ABS info) elsewhere, thus making everything easier to find and organize. The ultimate guide to pacman would then also elaborate on all the nifty things you can do with pacman and friends, along with concrete instructions instead of references to the manpage.

Greets,
Dennis

apeiro · 2003-08-12 00:45:02

I support you wholeheartedly. Doc on, brutha!

jlowell · 2003-08-13 07:37:04

Gyroplast & neri,

You probably thought I'd passed away and been buried in unconsecrated ground .:)

Actually, I've finally had an opportunity to review my makepkg.log from last Sunday and have something of a surprize to report to you. For all but the two packages I'd reported as good, the reason for the failure given by the file is "ftp client wget is not installed". Now I don't know whether "ftp client wget is not installed" is shorthand for the gnu-server being down or not - that was neri's analysis of my problem, of course - but that's what my file says. Must I have wget installed? It does not seem to be included with the base packages. And to the best of my knowledge I've got a good internet connection (ifconfig comes back fine as does pinging my ADSL provider). Comments?

jlowell

neri · 2003-08-13 08:18:12

jlowell wrote:

Gyroplast & neri,
For all but the two packages I'd reported as good, the reason for the failure given by the file is "ftp client wget is not installed". Now I don't know whether "ftp client wget is not installed" is shorthand for the gnu-server being down or not - that was neri's analysis of my problem, of course - but that's what my file says. Must I have wget installed? It does not seem to be included with the base packages. And to the best of my knowledge I've got a good internet connection (ifconfig comes back fine as does pinging my ADSL provider). Comments?
jlowell

Hi,

what says pacman -Q wget? Actually I think it is installed, otherwise I don't
know how your other 2 packages have been built. If it is not ->
pacman -S wget.

<speculation>
I dunno if makepkg uses wget as a fallback, in the case that another
cli-client doesn't work. Then makepkg will assume it fails because the wget
is not there. Actually it fell back because the first client din't find the file on
the server.
</speculation>

bye neri

orelien · 2003-08-13 12:18:43

"ftp client wget is not installed" means wget is not installed.
makepkg actually needs a download tool to retrieve files from the web.

From /etc/makepkg.conf:

# The FTP/HTTP download utility that makepkg should use to acquire sources
export FTPAGENT="/usr/bin/wget --continue --passive-ftp --tries=3 --waitretry=3"
#export FTPAGENT="/usr/bin/snarf"
#export FTPAGENT="/usr/bin/lftpget -c"

wget is the default one, but this can be configured. Simply update the FTPAGENT parameter.

Gyroplast · 2003-08-13 15:17:27

The ftp client used to download the packages is defined in the file /etc/makepkg.conf, where you can simply set this to whatever you like. "snarf" would be an alternative for example. AFAIK, wget is used as a default, though.

Yes, this has to be documented, thankyouverymuch.

jlowell · 2003-08-13 15:20:15

Hi orelien!

"ftp client wget is not installed" means wget is not installed

Well, that statement would seem sufficiently authoritative.

I'll install wget as a source package and run makeworld -bc /home/sourcepackages base and see what happens. If it works, I would certainly think a strong argument could be made for including wget among the install disc's base packages. Your thoughts? Anyone's thoughts?

jlowell

jlowell · 2003-08-17 20:04:04

Gyroplast, neri & orelien,

OK, after a brief detour to fix an annoyance with the boot sequence, I'm ready to get back to the matter of makeworld again. Since wget was not one of the base packages that installed from the CD, I installed it as a precompiled binary just a few minutes ago. I'd have built wget from source code as an non-base, individual addition but to do so requires that wget be installed first so I had no choice but to use the binary. Anyway, I'm ready to run makeworld -bc /home/sourcepackages base as we had discussed earlier, or at least nearly ready to do so.

Thinking ahead a little to the eventual pacman -Up /home/sourcepackages/*.pkg.tar.gz I'll be running to do the mass installation, it occurs to me that one of the base packages is grub, by present bootloader. Common sense would seem to require not installing that rebuild so as to avoid any and all problems at boot. Is there any way to keep grub out of the mix? Might I take the grub source build out of /home/sourcepackages, for example, without messing up the installation of anything else?

As an aside, it occurs to me that by merely adding wget to the list of base packages installed from the CD that, post install, a script of some kind might be written creating a directory like /home/sourcepackages, and running makeworld and pacman as indicated above, perhaps with an option to exclude grub or lilo, and a fully automated source installation could be achieved from the get-go or at least during post-install. I'd be willing to make a dedicated installation of Arch available on one of my machines to help achieve that objective by the time the next install CD is released. Arch has lots of potential in my opinion. I'd like to see it move in a direction that would permit it to offer a fully mature source based option.

I'll look forward to hearing from you.

jlowell

sarah31 · 2003-08-17 20:12:26

well i don't think that you need to be too worried about rebuilding of grub or lilo as you are not installing the packages right away (at least by your shown options). so i would thnk that just let them build (they don't tak every long to compile at all) but don't bother with installing them when they are done.

jlowell · 2003-08-17 22:14:16

Hi Sarah,

Yes, there's really no need to wait to compile the base packages is there; I can deal with the install issues when I get there. As a matter of fact makeworld is running now. Sadly, bash didn't make it (I'll figure out why later) but there's lots of white stuff scrolling by at the moment, I think it's binutils or something, so the basic functionality of makeworld seems to be intact. I'm sure there'll be more questions later.

Regards.

jlowell

Arch Linux

#26 2003-08-11 19:10:40

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#27 2003-08-11 19:28:55

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#28 2003-08-12 00:45:02

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#29 2003-08-13 07:37:04

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#30 2003-08-13 08:18:12

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#31 2003-08-13 12:18:43

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#32 2003-08-13 15:17:27

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#33 2003-08-13 15:20:15

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#34 2003-08-17 20:04:04

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#35 2003-08-17 20:12:26

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

#36 2003-08-17 22:14:16

Re: Some Questions Preinstall

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