Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x
Matthew D. Fuller
fullermd at over-yonder.net
Thu Jan 8 15:32:57 PST 2004
On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 03:36:42PM -0700 I heard the voice of
Scott Long, and lo! it spake thus:
>
> Unfortunately, there are two problems with this.
Now,
> The first is that it runs after the kernel has already booted, so SCSI
> devices that are handled by drivers on this floppy won't get probed.
This I hadn't known. Why is that? I thought when you loaded a module it
pulled up the driver and probed the hardware, which included scanning any
busses on it.
> The second is that forcing the user to know which driver is appropriate
> for their hardware is not very good form.
This is one of those things I list under the category of "letting floppy
installs be a bit ugly, or 'experienced-users only'-labelled".
> There are several documents linked off of http://www.freebsd.org/releng
> that describe how to build a release. It's not nearly as arcane of a
> process as it used to be 5 years ago. The biggest barrier to entry is
> probably disk space. You'll need a good 5GB free to hold the CVS repo,
> chroot environment, and resulting bits.
Well, I've got the CVS repo, though boy, has *THAT* ever grown since I
built this system; I had to trim it down to only src and ports, and even
so:
/dev/da1s1e 2032623 1769089 100925 95% /usr/cvs
Of course, I left out the ports and docs parts of the release last time I
tried (which was in fact about 5 years ago ;), though I had all kinda of
troubles with parts of THAT, too. But still, I don't have even a tenth
that much hard drive space around.
> Yes, to build the floppies you need to build most of the release, but
> once you've built the release, you can back-step and rebuild the
> floppies at will.
And building the whole release is quite an ordeal on a Pentium Pro :)
Still, I'm willing to donate some time and brain to the problem, since
apparently I kinda care about it. It seems to me that the probing
problem above is the biggest problem from a real coding POV; the rest is
mostly just a whole heck of a lot of implementation, and "inconvenience"
from the usability standpoint. That's a breaking point.
--
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"
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