Re: Rollbackto .tgz proposal

Kamil Rytarowski <[email protected]> Sun, 25 Oct 2020 23:45:06 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.os.netbsd.devel.installation
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 25.10.2020 19:41, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 25, 2020 at 05:35:42PM +0100, Kamil Rytarowski wrote:
>> 1. They introduce inconsistency between ports and versions, this breaks
>> upgrade scripts.
> 
> Which are trivial to fix.
> 

This is not that trivial to fix it in a generic way.

The trivial part is to unconditionally switch between archive extension
in a tool, but this constantly breaks the "other" types sets as used by
the users.

However if you have a fix or want to improve sysupgrade, please step in.

>> 2. Overflowing .iso/.img files on the switched ports is unimportant
>> these days as ~everybody installs in a VM or with USB. Buying CDR is
>> almost as hard as buying floppies these days.
> 
> My experience differs (buying CDRs) and on some machines it is *by far*
> the most easy installation method unless you have proper infrastructure
> around to netboot (which is quite a barrier for new users).
> 

If that experience is about ordering in internet then right, it's still
possible to find CDR there. If I would want to by CDR in my city in real
life, I wouldn't know where to go..

It's starting to be a challenge to find a new computer still equipped
with a CDROM device. I just checked a few laptops from an internet
reseller company and all of them were without the embedded device.

> This is not something I came up with (or even noticed myself), but that
> was triggered by user feedback.
> 

I keep receiving the negative feedback about the switch. I have switched
amd64 in pkgsrc and then I received the negative feedback from other
users as older releases use .tgz...

> I am not happy with performance (time + memory wise) of xz either, especially
> not at build time (someone should fix tooo's xz-vs-libpthread issues) myself,
> but I don't see a good alternative currently.
> 

It would be nice to produce .tgz sets by default always. Produce tar.xz
optionally on anything you find OK.

This will duplicate the space on ftp, but at least the upgrade path will
always work.

> Martin
>
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)