>>>4. As someone remarked, if ftp fails the messages blast by so fast
>>>   that you can not tell what happened.

>>This has been a *long-standing* problem.  I'm not sure how to bash on
>>curses to get around it.  Perhaps Phil can look at it this weekend.

>The solution I used for this problem in a simple shell based menu
>system was if an executed process fails, just put up a
>"press any key to continue..." message so they can read the errors.
>If everything worked, just return imediately to the menu.

But sysinst does this. See util.c:extract_file(), where it does

>	/* Check tarexit for errors and give warning. */
>	if (tarexit)
>		ask_ynquestion (msg_string(MSG_tarerror), 0, path);
>


So i think the problem is that tar doesn't return an error code if the
tarball doesn't exist at all.

I've added a sleep(5) in my own tree which at least makes any messages
visible.



I've also added code to check each of the tarballs exists before
trying to untar it, and to gripe if they don't -- at least for the
non-FTP, non-floppy cases.  I've also added code to count missing
tarballs and errors, and to show the user the counts of
missing/failed/successful unpacks at exit.

Should I commit that, or what?