In article <199404042205.AAA03279@eunet.ch> mw@eunet.ch writes:
> Hey, even if so, wouldn't you rather make several partitions on such a drive?

I wouldn't... Besides, what happens to /dev/sdXc on such a drive?

> Anyway, I still think this HAS to be an option, only a (small) minority  of
> our user base will ever face such decisions...

I think that minority is a lot larger than you realize.  For one thing,
NetBSD is going to attract power users...  it demands a lot of memory,
reasonably fast processor, and disk to begin with, and people who will
spend for that are likely to spend for big disks as well, especially
with the prices on them plummeting like they are.  That minority will
get even larger with time.  I have been running NetBSD on a system with
a >2GB disk for several months now.  I haven't used the last partiton
(the one over 2GB yet), because I didn;'t want to trash anything else. 
I've been running a sun3 with a 1G disk for about two years.  This isn't
a rare and unusual thing to do, nor am I a wealthy hacker with lots of
bucks to blow on luxuries... 

> Actually, for me it's even more an issue of software compatibility
> (I'm not even talking binary compatibility for a change:-)), the
> current system is very handy to compile all sorts of available
> sources, without having to dwelve into each and every source file to
> "fix" some incompatibilities (howdy solaris 2...). I don't want to

But the off_t change doesn't seem to be that big a deal in reality... 
certainly no worse than the sys_errlist change or a slew of other things
that have changed in NetBSD.  Besides which, many commercial unicen
either already have gone or are going this way, so it'll soon be the
norm, and all the free software out there will migrate to it. Shoot, not
that long from now, *not* having big off_t's could cause portability
problems!

> Sure, just make the extension conditional...

Do you have a way to actually do this? Cleanly? I think the changes
needed to support both would probably add more bloat than just going
64bit.

> > 	I personally am against changing the default on something this
> > 	fundemental vs the other NetBSD ports. This is supposed to be
> 
> I don't rate it THAT fundamental, it is one aspect of 4.4, nothing more.

Yes, but if every other port goes to big off_t's, it WILL be a
fundamental difference between ports that will cause no end of headaches.

I think losing compatibility with the rest of NetBSD is far worse than
any of the disadvantages, real or immagined, of the off_t change. There
are all little things each of us dislikes about NetBSD, and nobody's
going to get their own way every time. However, I'm willing to live with
the results rather than having a hundred different variants. FreeBSD vs
NetBSD is already enough of a mess, let's not make it worse.

If you really hate 64 bit off_t's, then bring it up on current-users.
If it's bad for the amiga, it's surely just as bad for the other ports,
no? Heck, the speed impact should be worse on the i386 since they have
fewer general purpose registers to use. Whatever the final decision of
NetBSD as a whole, though, I think we should live with it.

(And another question.. how come those of you who are opposed to the
off_t change aren't protesting the uid_t/gid_t changes as well? Surely
they have a similar effect.)

-- 
Ty Sarna                 "As you know, Joel, children have always looked
tsarna@endicor.com        up to cowboys as role models. And vice versa."

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