Floppies for ALPHA

[Wilko Bulte]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 12:54:36PM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 11:17:38AM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 03:58:46PM -0600, Scott Long wrote:
> > [...]
> > > This is a loosing fight.  While there is still some value in having
> > > floppies for x86, is there really any value in them for Alpha?  My
> > > understanding is that CD-ROMs have been standard on all Alphas for
> > > the past 5-10 years.  Netbooting is an easy alternative for those
> > > without CDs or bandwidth.  We do not do floppies for sparc64 and ia64,
> > > and I would hope/expect that we don't do them for amd64.  I think it's
> > > time to cut them out of Alpha.
> > > 
> > I plan on working on removing floppy support for AMD64 now.
> > Not that we support installing from floppies on AMD64 now, no,
> > this is rather a tidying up of release/Makefile and other
> > infrastructure.
> > 
> > After that, it will be trivial to axe the floppy support for
> > Alpha too.
> > 
> I've got that feeling that the consensus was to drop the floppy
> support for Alpha, as supporting it becomes a nightmare.  If so,

Yes, that consensus seems to be there. Finally.. :)

The question is if the way forward is a minimini.iso so a really
minimal ISO image (<< in size that miniinst.iso) or some other mechanism
like NetBSD or ancient SunOS 3.x used. Which, IIRC, was an image one dropped
in to the swap area of a disk and booted from. 

I'm getting comments that miniinst.iso is too big. Which I buy. I also get
comments that only ISOs aka mandatory CDboot is not acceptable. Which I
personally don't buy :)

Other than that I think the patch does what you intend it to do.

Wilko
-- 
|   / o / /_  _   		wkb at freebie.xs4all.nl
|/|/ / / /(  (_)  Bulte