In message <2cbstslh7g.fsf@wanda.autonomica.se>, Johan Ihren writes:
>I fully agree that the number of needed partitions seem to be more
>dependent upon the need to access filesystems belonging to other OSes
>than a need to micromanage storage local to NetBSD. This is exactly
>why I think an easy way out where we go from 8 to 16 or thereabouts is
>sufficient.

It may be.

>I hope I will never fragment my NetBSD storage into more than, let's
>say 8 pieces (/, /var, /usr, /usr/src, /usr/{local,pkg}, /usr/home and
>two more) on one disk. Likewise, I sincerely hope I will never have to
>run more than the present 3 OSes on my laptop. And if there only was a
>VMware for NetBSD I'd be much closer to finally ditching Lunix... ;-)

8 pieces, sure, but on, say, i386, you can only have 5.  b, c, and d are
all spoken for.

I typically split systems at least as far as
	/
	swap
	/usr
	/usr/src
	/var
	/usr/local
	/usr/pkg
	/home
I can't do this on most NetBSD platforms... but it gets worse.  On a lot
of systems, it's also useful to me to have a /usr/home distinct from /home.

Then we get into stuff like "/usr/obj" (so you can leave the source tree
alone)...

>I cannot comment on whether this is technically feasible, but I
>certainly agree that the need for "partitions" for foreign filesystems
>belonging to other OSes is for exchanging data, not to boot from. So,
>if access to those filesystems can be arranged in a non-partition-
>consuming way that's ok too.

That would be sort of useful, yes.

I'd still like to see things generalized at least to 16 on all the likely
platforms.

-s