name@portia.Stanford.EDU (tony cooper) (08/03/89)
Note: The following may not be the fault of finstall. It may be due to the Xwindows distribution on floppy disk. The finstall version I used was 1.23. I accidentally destroyed a directory in my X windows distribution and I decided to restore it from the original floppy disks. I grabbed disk no 6 out of 11 (just a guess) and mounted it. Rather than manually look at the disk I thought I would use the finstall list feature to see what was on the disk (since the files are packed). So I unmounted it and executed finstall. It would not let me look at the disk - I had to start with disk number 1. So I put in no 1 and it would not let me go any further since I did not have enough space on the disk. Of course I did have enough, since I only wanted to install one directory. But then finstall said it was going to delete the files it had installed already. Then it went ahead and deleted my whole X distribution!!! All five or whatever megabytes. And could I stop it? No. CTRL/C and every other keystroke I could hit wouldn't stop it. Bye bye files. So I loaded the distribution from scratch. But it wouldn't let me start since it said I did not have enough space??? I had just cleaned out 5 Mb or so, so of course I had more than enough. So I removed some files till I had as much free space as it asked for. Is this the end of this story? No. I got through 4 out of 11 disks then it again said I did not have enough room. Finstall reestimates how much space it needs after each disk and now it had decided it needed even more. So it deleted all the four disks worth that I had just installed. I deleted some more files and started again with crossed fingers. This time it worked and I had 2.5 Mb free. Ie finstall was 2.5Mb wrong in its guess as to how much space it needed. So this is what is needed: 1) finstall should let us install disks in any order. 2) finstall should let us install even when we don't have enough space. 3) finstall should let the user keep everything installed so far. 4) finstall needs to be interruptible when deleting files. 5) finstall should have a much better idea of how much space it needs. Regarding (2) finstall prompted asking if I wanted to stop the installation. I said no but it stopped anyway.