About PR #186030: what changes to nanobsd would be useful today?

[Arrigo Marchiori]

Dear Embedded list,

TL;DR; a long time ago I reported bug #186030 [1] that initially
received some feedback, then nothing. Would anyone be interested in
the same type of change (dropping fdisk) in favor of mkimg(1)? Or
maybe just in the creation of the code slice before the disk image?

1: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=186030

Longer version follows.

The PR introduces two changes to nanobsd(8):

 - use gpart(8) instead of fdisk(8) to create partitions;
 
 - create the "code slice" before the whole "disk image" and thus
   allow for faster builds when the disk image is not required.

I have been carrying on those changes for years, advancing FreeBSD
versions as they became obsolete.

I have not received any feedback since 2014 (except one in 2018 that
looks like a generic housekeeping message). This has not been a
problem for me in any way, because I was actually using the patch, and
I just wanted to share it in case it could be useful for someone.

Now I want to drop gpart(8) in favor of mkimg(1), due to
incompatibilities between i386 and amd64 geom(8) syscalls.

Would anyone be interested if I updated that PR, or closed and
re-opened another one, in order to use mkimg(1) instead of fdisk(8)?

Alternatively, is the possibility to create the code slice before the
disk image still interesting? I could also issue a PR just for that.

Please understand that this is not a complaint at all, but just a
request for what would be a useful work for the community, as I have
to carry it out anyway.

If I receive no feedback I will just carry on... as I have been doing
until today :-)

Best regards,
-- 
Arrigo

http://rigo.altervista.org