Description: Attempting to install arch with the new aif system on 2009.08 netinstall CD, doing a net install. I forgot to turn on eth0 and give it an IP address; aif said:

WARNING: installation failed (see errors below)
error: 'openssh': not found in sync db
openssh package not found, searching for group...
Package installation FAILED
(above three lines repeat twice)

aif then tried to continue the rest of the installation anyway, which of course completely failed. At the end it printed:

Execution report:
Phase preparation: Success
Phase basics: Success
Phase system: Success
Phase finish: Success

Which is somewhat inaccurate.

The debug log (when I specified -d) provided no more information about the problem. What happens to the output of pacman, sfdisk, and all of those commands?

Recommended fix:

- No need to add extra routines to diagnose whether the network is up, etc. -- just print the output of pacman to stdout and the hundreds of "cannot connect" lines will clue the user in to this particular problem.
- Abort the entire procedure if there's a failed step. In some cases continuing could be catastrophic (e.g. if a partition table edit failed and the script goes ahead with mkfs).
- I would also like to see the output of the partitioning and mkfs commands. I really hope -f isn't specified by default on any of them, and that a failed filesystem creation will abort the entire procedure. That just seems like a sane safety feature.