S10U2 companion problems

Recently, the update 2 of Solaris 10 was released.

Along with this comes the companion CD - a collection of unsupported freeware.

However, the S10U2 companion DVD has a number of problems. Apart from the old one of being distributed as a single ISO image with both sparc and x86 binaries, so that you have to download both architectures even if you only wanta one, some new problems have appeared.

• There isn't an installer. THere are over a hundred packages here and installing them individually by hand can get a bit tedious.
• Worse, some packages depend on packages that are no longer shipped. I had to install SFWgcc2l, SFWgcc34l, SFWgfile, SFWgtext, SFWshutl, and probably SFWgm4 off the S10U1 companion to get the dependencies and missing components back.
• Some useful utilities (some of them listed above, but also things like bluefish) have just disappeared.
• Coreutils has been added, without the g prefixes.

For all that pain, is there any gain? I can't see any. I can't see any new packages that add any value, we've lost functionality, the installed packages don't work, and it's not even as if we have anything useful like a more up to date version of KDE.

I recommend going back to the S10U1 companion.