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

[Paul Robinson]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 02:00:40PM +1030, Daniel O'Connor wrote:

> You still need the right drivers, ie which SCSI controller/network/... cards 
> you have to get a minimal install is _more_ when you are doing FTP (you need 
> a network).

Out of around 300+ installs of FreeBSD I've done over the last few years, 
about 12 of them were by CD. The rest were FTP kick-started off floppy. 
Normally, because I happened to have the two floppies I needed in my shirt 
pocket.

Since 4.x I have never had a problem with drivers, depsite installing on a 
range of hardware from non-branded Taiwanese notebooks through to £30k 
enterprise servers.

I don't see the problem with floppy install.

However, as Jordan said when discussing libh 
(http://rtp1.slowblink.com/~libh/sysinstall2/improvements.html):

"As I mentioned in Section 2.3, one of the more annoying problems with 
FreeBSD's current distribution format is the dividing line between 
distributions and packages. There should really only be one type of 
"distribution format" and, of course, it should be the package (There Can Be 
Only One). Achieving this means we're first going to have to grapple with 
several problems, however:

First, eliminating the distribution format means either teaching the 
package tools how to deal with a split archive format (they currently do 
not) or divorcing ourselves forever from floppies as a distribution medium. 
This is an issue which would seem an easy one to decide but invariably 
becomes Highly Religious(tm) every time it's brought up. In some dark corner 
of the world, there always seems to be somebody still installing FreeBSD via 
floppies and even some of the fortune 500 folks can cite FreeBSD success 
stories where they resurrected some old 386 box (with only a floppy drive 
and no networking/CD/...) and turned it into the star of the office/saved 
the company/etc etc. That's not to say we can't still bite that particular 
bullet, just that it's not a decision which will go down easily with 
everyone and should be well thought-out."

I should point out, this appears to have been written some time ago, late 
2002 I'm guessing.
 
-- 
Paul Robinson