Re: Tasks

[David Brownlee <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Andrew Doran wrote:

> - One question is how we integrate it with pkgsrc. Does the packages simply
>  go into the meta-packages directory? Do we keep a private tree? Do we get
>  a NetBSD *system* specific directory in pkgsrc? Thought required. I bet
>  someone on packages@ can answer this and/or will be keen to help.

        I'd be very much inclined to just drop it into meta-packages.
        Its simple enough to have compile time options on given
        packages (even meta ones - see the pulseaudio option in
        the meta-pkgs/gnome), but as we're targetting binary package
        users I would stay away from that and break it up into
        'free' and 'non free' packages as you suggested.

        We can have the packages include different sub packages and
        compile options on an arch basis, which will be handy for
        apps which might be available for i386 and not amd64 (and
        eventually vica versa)

        (Thats probably the end of my useful contribution to this
        particular message, the below gets less relevant)

> - Need to look into enabling line editing and tab completion by default in
>  sh/ksh. If someone can figure it out a good way to do this by default, I
>  will be happy to absorb any flamage and commit the changes.

        I would have assumed a 'set -o emacs' in /etc/profile, but I'm
        having ksh seem to give command line completiom by default on
        my systems here (even the ones I have not configured), which
        is odd... Someone needs to test of a blank 5.0 install :/

> - sysinst needs some basic mods, the most important batch would be add a
>  menu to select normal/expert install, and following from that to make the
>  install easy by asking as few questions a possible. It should be ok to run
>  the dynamically linked sysinst straight out the build directory on an
>  existing, running system and install onto another disk. Or it could easily
>  run in qemu. It's very easy to build sysinst and release CD images if
>  needed, if someone asks on the list I will write out the steps.

        I can see us getting a lot of qemu usage out of this...
        As an aside, should we be shipping a dynamic sysinst with
        NetBSD?

> - Another part is getting X to autoconfigure. From my perspective this means
>  doing a bit of research, I don't know well enough what happens with it. Is
>  X -configure smart enough these days? Can we figure out how to set the
>  keyboard layout given what we ask in sysinst? Is it worth looking at what
>  Ubuntu/Fedora do? Anyone want to add the code to sysinst? Should be simple
>  enough.

        X autoconfigures quite well, apart from handling a different
        video chipset.

        I've been running with NetBSD on an external USB drive for the
        last week or so while waiting for a replacement thinkpad fan, and
        consed up a quick rc.d script to replace the Driver section of
        xorg.conf with the data from the probed device to handle when
        its plugged into a machine with a different chipset without
        losing any config from the rest of the file.

        Thinking about it I should have added a test to see if the chipset
        had changed and left the file alone in that case.

        Sorry, only tangentally related, but in the odd case where someone
        upgrades a graphics card or switches their disk to another machine
        it would be nice if X could still start.

set_xorg_conf()
{
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/pkg/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/pkg/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin
        NEWCONF=/root/xorg.conf.new
        rm -f $NEWCONF
        X -configure 2>/dev/null

        if [ ! -f $NEWCONF ] ; then
                echo "localsetup: $NEWCONF not generated"
        else
                mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old
                (
                awk '/^Section "Device"/{skip=1};skip!=1{print};
                     /^EndSection/{skip=0}' < /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old
                awk '/^Section "Device"/, /^EndSection/' $NEWCONF
                ) > /etc/X11/xorg.conf
        fi
}



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