[Cc'ed to current-users, since there are people making CDs for use
  with sysinst on other ports than i386.]

 Darren Reed writes:

>Ah.  Well, my suggestion would be that it'd work something like this:
>
>- you tell it what release you're installing (i.e. NetBSD-1.3,
>  NetBSD-2.0, etc)
>- you tell it where you're installing from (ftp/NFS/cd-rom/HD)
>- you tell it where to find the NetBSD-1.3 directory if it is via NFS
>  or FTP (e.g. ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub if /pub/NetBSD-1.3 was the top
>  of the tree there)
>- or if it's mounting via CD-ROM or HD, NetBSD-1.3 would be expected
>  to be in the "top directory" of that device so that sysinst could
>  (say) mount it as /mnt and find the installation in /mnt/NetBSD-1.3.

AFAIK sysinst *can* do all of these already.  

The misfeature is that the _default_ path for CDs is
"/Release/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.3", which gets mounted under /mnt2, so the
default CD installation looks for a release(7) hierarchy under
/mnt2/Release/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.3.

That default wasn't my idea, btw. I solicited input for more practical
names, from people interested in cutting CDs, and we didn't get any
feedback.  I dont see what the "/Release" buys, and I'm agnostic about
the "/NetBSD" too.

>btw, can I compile sysinst for 1.3 on 1.2 or a late 1.2<alpha> ?

Sorry, no idea about 1.2.  I doubt it'll run on 1.2 (for testing) if
it builds; I dont know if all the relevant disk geometry ioctls were
present.

If you mean 1.3<alpha>, not 1.2<alpha>, sure, you can build sysinst.

However, sysinst compiles the host OS version into its default
pathnames, so you will want to frob osrelease.sh in your source
hierarcy.  If it were me, I'd wait a couple of days, install 1.3.1,
and build on (and from) that. 

The version strings built into default paths would be a problem even
if everything else builds under 1.2; I dont remember when the scripts
used by the sysinst Makefile appeared.