On Sun, 5 Oct 1997, der Mouse wrote:

> > But none of these things sounds reasonable in the context of a code
> > freeze that's three weeks away.  This is a change that should be made
> > and given a _lot_ of time to settle out, not just three weeks.
> 
> Heh.  I agree that this should not be in 1.3, though I'm not convinced
> it needs all that much settling out; the only downsides to it I've
> found are (1) it halves the number of available packs and (2) handling
> the interval during which the kernel disagrees with /dev is nontrivial.
> Since at least one port _already_ has MAXPARTITIONS>8 (Amiga, IIRC),
> anything MI should already have been shaken out.  (So why do I think it
> doesn't belong in 1.3?  Largely because of the upgrade hell, item (2)
> above.  I believe this is fixable, but not before 1.3 - I dealt with
> that interval by hand, something I do not want to ask any significant
> fraction of our user base to do.)

My thought on dealing with the upgrade interrum was that the kernel could
just go look at /dev and see what's there. The right time to do it would
be when we look to see if /dev/console exists. We then just go look for
/dev/wd1a, /dev/sd1a, etc. The tricky parts are that a) we could end up
with a different partition count for wd's as for sd's, and b) we could
have file system damage which would mess things up.

Well, that's what I'd supported for quite a while. But since I've heard
Jason mention just going to a different device storage on disk, I like
that idea better. :-)

Take care,

Bill