[SunRescue] Dummy alert --- what exactly is sol8 pkgadd looking for?

[User Bobkeys BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak]

> Oh yeah, we should have warned you the standard Sol 8 partitioning scheme
> isn't very bright. Actually unless you are a single user and dont plan on
> installing anythign at all it's pretty braindead.

I concur.  I took a set of sol8-01-01 disks home last night for some testing
on my Classic.  After some poking around with different values in the funky
partitioning wizard/lizard, and consulting the help section, I arrived at
some values that will seem to work, and not leave me high and dry with
full-up partitions.

> As far as pkgadd not working, what command line are you using? If you
> download gcc-2.95.3.tar.gz it's not a package it's straight source.

Understood.  That would be the traditional tarball, mostly obviously.

> If you got gcc-2.95.3.pkg.tgz copy it to say /var/tmp then unzip it, untar
> it, then run the commandline
> 
> pkgadd -d /var/tmp
> 
> And it should autmatically bring up the package install screen.

This did not work from the pkg.tgz files I got out of sunsite.
The tree that unrolled out of the tarball looked like a packaged
suite, i.e., a pkg map and root tree, etc., were there, and the
root tree contained a usr fs load into usr/local.  Pkgadd -d ./thattree
came back with the pkg files not found error.  It did begin to work
with the pkg out of freeware, except for the full-var syndrome.
Now that that silly var sizing is fixed, it should do fine.

> If you got gcc-2.95.3-sol8-sparc-local.gz copy it to /var/tmp and unzip it,
> then run the command
> 
> pkgadd -d /var/tmp/gcc-2.95.3-sol8-sparc-local

That seemed to work mostly, except for filling up var on big loads like
gcc and teTeX.  That will probably work now that I came up with a more
logical partitioning sizing.

> If that doesnt work then you got the wrong package type, or didnt download
> it properly.

I can't blame downloading.  I haven't had a bad download in almost 15 years
that I have been on ethernet.  Prior to that, yup.  I will work with the
freeware downloads first, and leave the sunsite downloads until the end.
Most are approximate duplicates anyway, and the only real thing I need
is a working gcc, since I compile most everything else after that.

I am surprised Sun did not work out some kind of arrangement to include
gcc on one of the usual release cd's, since gzip is there.  I know they
are trying to push their compiler, but, gcc is the poor man's defacto
standard, otherwise.  IFF they really thought about it, that might be
a good move.

Thanks, Chris...

Bob

> gmake less and others barf with cpio errors:
> 
>    cpio: Bad magic number/header.
 
Anyone have any ideas, yet, as to what might be happening here?