Removal of /stand Directory

[Ryan Sommers]

After a thread on current@ and private discussion following, myself and 
the other party were in agreement that /stand serves no purpose after 
the initial install. Most of /stand is duplicated in /rescue with the 
exception of a few members. This makes the approx. 3mb of space consumed 
by /stand wasted space.

The only post-install dependency on /stand I can find is the diskless rc 
script. This script uses /stand/cpio and /stand/gzip for unpacking 
template archives to populate memory disks. I have come up with two 
solutions that would solve this problem. The first involves /bin/pax and 
moving gzip to /bin/gzip. This would be enough to unpack archives for 
diskless systems. The other is to use /rescue/tar and /rescue/gzip.

Currently /rescue uses gtar, however, this will likely be switched to 
bsdtar after 5.3-RELEASE (see PR bin/72549). This will add cpio and pax 
support to /rescue/tar (in addition to saving approx. 40k). I don't 
believe using /rescue is the correct solution for diskless systems.

Which is why I propose moving gzip to /bin. This would increase /bin by 
about 46k. However, upon removing /stand the net would be a savings in 
the root partition. /bin/pax and gzip are capable of handling the 
diskless template archives and will also be updated as part of world to 
receive any bugfixes.

If people agree with this, after providing patches for moving gzip to 
/bin I plan on addressing sysinstall to have /stand removed as part of 
the post-install cleanup/configuration. And then after I'd like to work 
on bringing our support and instructions for diskless environments up to 
date with 5.X.

Anyone have any thoughts, objections, feelings on this? If anyone has 
already started work on this but doesn't have the time let me know and 
I'd be happy to pick up where they left off. Otherwise I'm willing to 
put in the grunt work if anyone is willing to help commit it once 
5.3-release is out of the way.

-- 
Ryan Sommers
ryans at gamersimpact.com