at the time, but on further reflection..." bucket with these changes.
1. Checking the media before frobbing the disks was a fine idea, and
I wish it could have worked, but that leads to a rather difficult
situation when you need to mount the media someplace and you're about
to:
a) Chroot away from your present root.
b) Newfs the root to be.
You're basically screwed since there's no place to stick the mount
point where it will be found following the newfs/chroot (and eliminating
the chroot in favor of just using the "root bias" feature would work
great for the distributions but not the pkg_add calls done by the
package installer).
2. Automatic timeout handling. I don't know why, but alarm() frequently
returns no residual even when the alarm didn't go off, which defies
the man page but hey, since when was that so unusual? Take out timeouts
but retain the code which temporarily replaces the SIGINT handler in
favor of a more media-specific handler. This way, at least, if it's hanging
you can at least whap it. I think the timeout code would have been losing
over *really slow* links anyway, so it's probably best that it go.
This should fix NFS, tape & CDROM installs again (serves me right for getting
complacent and using just the FTP installs in my testing).