Date: 12 May 1996 00:00:01 EST

  Paul "Mr. inst" Jackson of SGI <pj@sgi.com> explains two reasons:

  - The "orphan" subsystem is a special subsystem for directories in
    which more than one product keeps files. inst will remove these
    directories as they become empty. Do NOT remove the subsystem
    yourself. In fact, you can only see it due to a cosmetic bug in some
    versions of inst.

  - The product spec file in /var/inst which describes that subsystem is
    damaged, due either to the usual sort of file-damaging problems or
    to a bug in IRIX 5.3's inst. This also makes inst think that that
    product is version 0, and thus incompatible with every other
    subsystem. There is no patch for the bug. The workaround is to
    reinstall the affected subsystems with all files restricted, so that
    no files are actually installed but the product spec file is
    updated, like so:
  
    inst -f whatever -X/
    Inst> set exclusions		# Should be set to "Value /"
    Inst> keep *
    Inst> install upgrade
    Inst> list i			# Should see the unknown entries
    Inst> go
    Inst> quit

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