Some questions about NetBSD

[alec <alecm%gmx.com@localhost>]

Hello

I recently saw news about the NetBSD 8.0 release, and I thought it might
work well for a personal project I've been planning to do, and I've been
wanting to try something new. I'm a longtime Linux user, but I never
used BSDs before. I had a spare Raspberry Pi, so I decided to first
throw NetBSD on it to try it out.

The first question is about the installation process. I downloaded the
image [1], dd'd it onto an sdcard and once it started, it automatically
resized the partition to take up the entire card, rebooted and was ready
to use.

But, that's not exactly what I want. According to the guide [2], there
should be an installer where I can configure the partition layout among
other things. Apparently, ARMv6 does come with an it [3], but not ARMv7.

Q1: Is there an alternative way to install NetBSD? I see that there's
binary/kernel and binary/sets directories - is it possible to manually
partition/format the disk, extract those and have it working? Is there
any guide on how to do it?

Next, I noticed that there was a lot of things installed. For example, I
don't need X11. On Linux, pretty much everything is managed by the
package manager, but pkgsrc only takes care of /usr/pkg.

Q2: How can I uninstall unwanted system sets?

Following up on that, if the core system is not managed by a package
manager...

Q3: What happens if a security vulnerability is found in the base
system? Do I really have to fetch things from CVS and recompile them? Or
is there some way to get updates?

I see that in security.conf(5) it says it scans pkgs for vulnerabilities
daily (and I suppose if there are, there would be binary package
updates), but what about the base system?

And lastly, speaking of pkgsrc, if I try to point it at HTTPS:
  export PKG_PATH="https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/earmv7hf/8.0/All";
it fails.

Q4: Is there any signature on the packages to ensure integrity?

Thanks!


[1] https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-8.0/evbarm-earmv7hf/binary/gzimg/
[2] https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-exinst.html
[3] https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-8.0/evbarm-earmv6hf/binary/gzimg/