Jay O'Brien wrote:
Why are there two versions of sysinstall, one five times the size of the other, and what are the differences between them other than file size and time?
Jay O'Brien
Rio Linda, California, USA
Sorry I'm late on this ... you've got a good technical answer already; I thought maybe I could add more detail; there is, apparently, a more or less historical reason, as well as the practical one. The practical one: it's a Good Thing(tm) to have sysinstall(8) in /stand/ (on the root partition) where you can get at it in the event /usr is unavailable. Indeed, it pretty much *has* to be under / to install the system....
History wise, sysinstall started out 10 years ago in /sbin. Looks as if Poul-Henning-Kamp and either Bill Paul (or Paul Traina?) did the work. From the oldest dusty attic:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sbin/sysinstall/Attic/
Then, for 2.0, Jordan Hubbard "birthed the monster"
that, I guess, is still sysinstall today ... although it's
morphed so many times, it's probably not recognizable
as the same beast any longer[?] {Basically, how could I
know, as a relative newb with Neandertal C skills?}
For a long time afterwards, sysinstall lived in
/usr/src/release:http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/release/sysinstall/Attic/
Both of these sysinstalls, near as I can tell, built their binary(ies) into /stand/, but nowhere else.
Now, sysinstall doesn't inhabit "userland", per se. AFAIK /usr/src/release doesn't get rebuilt during a "make world" cycle; furthermore, though slightly less relevant, /stand/ isn't in $PATH --- if you try "whereis sysinstall" on a 4.X box:
#whereis sysinstall sysinstall: /usr/share/man/man8/sysinstall.8.gz
Perhaps I'm reading history wrongly, but it seems the
Project wanted to DTRT and make sure that if an
updated manpage was installed for sysinstall, the
updated binary was, also. To have the manpage
say something the binary can't/won't do violates
the POLA, something the Project is exceptionally
loath to do in almost every situation ....
So, the bikeshed got painted again: sysinstall was moved to /usr/sbin, where it would be rebuilt when the system was updated. Prior to that time (Jan. 2001), you had to go to /usr/src/release/sysinstall and "make all install" to update the binary under /stand/ --- leading to a situation where you might have, say, 4.2 installed, but have a sysinstall binary left over from 3.0 or something, and it wasn't very useful. Furthermore, you can still have a similar situation in 4.X, because the change was never MFC'd to -STABLE, and therefore hasn't appeared until 5.X; (Hmm, will this become a FAQ?) Note I didn't say "same problem", but "same situation"; I don't personally know if any additional work on sysinstall during the 4.X's reign as production release would have rendered an older version obsolete or not. I'm tempted to say it hasn't much, because the "libh" project was supposed to complete reimplement the installer, and I think the old monster had been more/less left to hide in his cave and blow smoke at passers-by (complaining about the installer *IS* a FAQ)....
You can find the discussion about the change at:
http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/archive/2001/freebsd-current/20010114.freebsd-current.html
The second "sysinstall" thread ("sysinstall.8 breaking buildworld") kind
of shows how it got hashed out amongst the committers, and has some
other factoids that I found educational. I hope my penchant for historical
digression hasn't annoyed you, and welcome corrections to what I've
presented as facts (though we needn't be pedantic, IMHO)Kevin Kinsey _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
