Re: sysinst extended partitioning won't set/do the "newfs" flag!

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Tue, Nov 02, 2021 at 06:07:48PM -0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> I now see from the source that the mysterious "install" flag should only
> be set on one partition (though I'm still not quite sure exactly what
> it's supposed to mean, except that this is to be the root filesystem,
> though why it can't figure that out from the mount point being "/" is
> not clear).

It means "install into this partition" - nothing more. It can not always
know that from the mount point, as that is not always available. Think
of an old style BIOS MBR installation - you pick one free MBR partition
and mark that as "install", then it becomes the fdisk type 169 partition
and all newly created NetBSD partitions will be inside it. One of the
inner partitions will get / as a mount point.

In many other setups it makes no real sense and is just equivalent to
the partition that has / as a mount point.

> In any case my basic expectations for the requirements of the most basic
> functionality of the "extended partitioning" feature is that I should be
> able to use it to install on a system with a "bunch" of disks, making
> one or more filesystems (or, e.g., swap partitions) on each disk, and
> having them be newfs'ed (or not) and mounted (or not) for the target
> system (all before extracting sets, i.e. mounted under /targetroot), and
> have the resulting configuration all be written to the new target's
> /etc/fstab.

Yes, that matches my expectations, but we are not there yet. I think I have
a PR open on that.

Martin