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

[Nicolas Rachinsky]

* Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> [2004-01-11 10:19 +0100]:
> Paul Robinson <paul at iconoplex.co.uk> writes:
> > Understood. I just think saying "let's get rid of floppies" is
> > shooting a dog that happens to be near to hand because you don't like
> > that dog, to stretch the analogy.
> 
> I don't think you have any idea how difficult it is (and has been for
> a couple of years now) just to keep the install floppies alive.  The
> kernel keeps growing, and the amount of "must-have" features (such as
> acpi) keeps growing, and every time the boot floppies overflow we have
> to toss out yet another driver that about a dozen people vehemently
> tell us they can't live without.

Why not split the kernel onto 2 disks? The code to do this is already
there and seems to work. And the people who think they absolutly need
disks would have to deal with 4 disks, but that would be better than
no disks.

Look at the commit history of /usr/src/lib/libstand/splitfs.c. Is
there a reason not to use it?

Nicolas