Floppy Support

[Duraid Madina]

Peter Schultz wrote:
 > Is floppy support a bad crutch for FreeBSD?

Yes, it is. Given that CDRs are generally cheaper than floppy disks, and 
that CDR drives are cheaper than some floppy disk drives, there's really 
no point to using floppies. As early as 1997, Intel declared their 
intention to deprecate the floppy, and they've basically done it (anyone 
bought a laptop lately?).

Anyone who wants to use floppies to install/repair FreeBSD will probably 
be more than happy to use 4.8, or 5.0. Indeed, the only machine I have 
with a floppy disk drive (a Compaq deskpro XE 560) can't even boot 
FreeBSD 4.x, let alone 5.x (due to a broken BIOS).

On the other hand, I am unable to easily install FreeBSD on my modern (6 
month old) run-of-the-mill PC, because support for my hard drive 
controller was only checked in a couple of days ago, but thanks to 
floppy-related brokenness, I haven't been able to download a snapshot 
ISO image.

Can anyone give a *good* reason why floppies should still be supported 
from this point onwards? Why should we make using a recent version of 
FreeBSD convenient for someone with a machine so old that it can't boot 
from CDROM (if memory serves, it was in 1995 that this feature became 
widespread) or with some other aversion to CDROM hardware, while making 
it more difficult for someone with recent hardware? This does appear to 
be what FreeBSD is doing. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong!)

	Puzzled,

	Duraid