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

[Paul Robinson]

Wes Peters wrote:

>Faster than loading a single ISO image with only the boot information and 
>sysinstall and booting from that, rather than 3 (or 4 or 5) floppies?  A 
>CD-R is cheaper, faster, more reliable, and you don't have to keep 
>feeding them into the machine.
>
I think you're missing the point, which I'll come onto, but first, the 
points you raise.

It's not cheaper than a floppy - I have stacks of old floppies here that 
are re-usable, unlike CD-Rs where I have to shell out for a new one 
every time. It isn't faster than a floppy, because I'm still doing an 
FTP install (because I've taken your advice and only downloaded a 3Mb 
file to "save time"). If you assume that burning the CD takes no longer 
than doing a dd (finding the machine would take me longer), it takes the 
same amount of time. Oh, you mean the extra 30 seconds to read the disk? 
Yeah, my life would be *much* improved if I could save that. (I'm trying 
to be ironic... :-) ).

It isn't "more reliable", as I do a diff on /dev/fd0 and the img file to 
make sure everything is OK after the dd, and therefore it's just as 
reliable. In fact, with cheap CD-Rs, I get a coaster-to-usable ratio of 
about 1:2 which is nowhere near as good as 3.5" floppy. As for "Keep 
feeding them into the machine"? It's two disks. Let me write that again. 
2. Two. One + one. This "constant feeding" is hardly likely to give me 
serious RSI. :-)

Perhaps I'm missing something, and I can see why abondoning the current 
method in 5-6 years would be reasonable, but I don't see the immediate 
advantage of making the change right now.

I also don't think it's the issue that needs to be dealt with - 
distribution is much, much, MUCH bigger an issue than "shall we get rid 
of floppies"? I sent this to the list before, but it got ignored, so 
I'll send it again, where Jordan points out we have bigger issues to 
deal with when discussing the "floppy disk problem" whilst 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."

And I have to say, I agree. If abondoning floppies is part of some well-thought-out and well-planned package management strategy, I'm all for it. Otherwise, let sleeping dogs lie?

-- 
Paul Robinson