> Those of us whose native platforms have
> >more sane partition table schemes, with functionality equal or superior to
> >that of the BSD disklabel format (I believe both the Mac and Amiga fall into
> >that category), see little reason for such kludges.
> 
> I agree. We should not adopt a kludge as our standard when we have a better
> option available.

except, as it currently stands, you _don't_ have a better option
available.

I.e. on either the Mac or the Amiga, i have to boot into the 'native'
OS to boot NetBSD.  I also have to boot into the native OS to
repartition the disk.  Lastly, i don't know how NetBSD/mac68k assigns
partition names, but the amiga does it in an, umm, hokey way.

What you have now isn't a "better option", it's a kludge.  BSD
disklabels _are_ a "standard", at least in NetBSD -- most ports use
them, and there are tools to manipulate them.

> Actually, it would be helpful to consider being able to mount EITHER format
> of HD on ANY version. IOW, the BSD in DOS style could be mounted as a
> foreign file system on a Mac and the Mac HD could be mounted on a 586.

This is a different problem.  there are other considerations,
e.g. endianness, that would need to be dealt with that make this non-trivial.

however, i _do_ think that ports which can run non-UN*X-like OSs
should support both "just plain BSD disklabels" as well as a hybrid
scheme.


chris