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

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 01:12:25PM -0600, William Grim wrote:
>If it's really such a big deal to get rid of floppy support, how about 
>we get rid of it and make sure an older version of FreeBSD 4.x/5.x is 
>always available for download?  This way, floppy users could install an 
>older version of the OS and cvsup to the latest version they want.

1) CVSup isn't an option for someone who wants to install a binary
   distribution and not have to do a buildworld.
2) Across major releases, "make world" is only defined for an up to
   date -STABLE to -CURRENT.  Crossing multiple major releases isn't
   supported.
3) It's common for major releases to recommend a reinstall.  5.x is the
   current case-in-point:  a reinstall allows upgrading to UFS2.
4) Bare-metal restores become very painful if you have to do a reversion
   and upgrade - especially if you want to use features that don't exist
   in the "older" version.
5) The "older version would need to be continuously upgraded with
   security fixes.  Would you feel safe with instructions that said (in
   essence) "Install FreeBSD 2.2.8 and then CVSup to 6.x" when 2.2.8
   was missing 5 years of security patches.

Peter