Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 03:43:55AM -0700 I heard the voice of
Scott Long, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> Well, regardless of how you label it, these floppies still require lots
> of care and feeding in order to work.  We currently have no way to
> support multiple floppies in a convenient way.

My hope is that, with this piece taken care of, the amount of care and
feeding necessary to maintain it will be minimized.  When adding new
drivers, you'd have to stick their names in a list somewhere to be split
out, but that's pretty minimal.  It should help avoid all the juggling we
keep having to do to manage the size.


> This can be fixed in a variety of ways that range from fragile hacks to
> wonderful designs, but it still requires someone to put forth the
> effort.  My offer for a 'floppy maintainer' is quite sincere; I hope
> that someone takes an interest and steps up to the challenge.

I have some interest in this, to be sure.  However, every time I've
ventured into src/release/ in the past, I've come away with an intense
desire for absinthe.  I've never successfully built a release, and it's
been my impression that you can't just build the floppies, you have to
build the full release to have everything in place to build them.  That
takes a huge chunk of disk space (to say nothing of _TIME_!  Just
building the kernel and modules takes the better part of a half hour),
which are two things in chronically short supply.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/

"The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is because I
      haven't figured out how to light the middle yet"