> back to the booter, id also like to be able to boot netbsd directly
> (ie. WITHOUT any part of the macos) and using the entire scsi disk
> as a whole using a BSD disklabel seems most apropriate for this.

I don't think that making code for accessing the disk or even one Mac
partition with a BSD disklabel is that hard.  Probably a couple of days,
but I'm personally sort of lacking the time and motivation to bother.

> what happens when i access partition 'c'?

You get the whole scsi disk.

> (ex: say i wanted to 'dd sd0c onto sd1c' both with identical BSD partitioning)
> its true under BSD/i386 using either of their partition schemes

This will make identical Mac/MacBSD disks.

> agreed, i dont want to boot macos at all to start netbsd.
> what do you do in a few years if apple stops distributing 'macos v.7.x'
> or even any macos for the m68k...

Presumably, someone motivated to solve the problem (e.g. you) will
figure out how to derive or guess the large number of things that we
currently obtain from MacOS because there's nowhere else to get the
information and no documentation.

> i thought the whole point of this was to have a FREELY AVAILABLE
> operating system for the macintosh... its not too free when it still 
> relies on a proprietary operating system is it?

In order to remove our reliance on MacOS, we would probably have
to enter a non-disclosure agreement with Apple and pay them $$
to get information on the boot process.  Then there would be a
proprietary chunk of MacBSD, copyrighted by Apple and probably
not freely distributable.

> and would be a great asset in enabling booting netbsd as standalone,
> OR booting it from within macos, at the option of the user.

Feel free to try what we haven't been able to do for three years.
Don't even bother saying that we "must not be any good, then,"
because lots of people have said that before and then failed to
prove their point.

> also i think it would be very useful (both in the install and through netbsd)
> to be able to read from the floppy as a filesystem (HFS/MSDOS/BSD?)

Sure.  Let us know when the floppy driver works.

This whole conversation is really getting stale.  All of the
contributions to MacBSD came from people who, instead of saying
"Let's do it this way," said, "it's done; where should I put it?"

		-Brad
-- 
Brad Grantham, grantham@tenon.com ** Diet caffeine-free Coke is really just
brown water with bubbles. ** I've learned from a little CMOS design that
soldering irons are VERY hot. ** A backflip a day keeps comfort away! ** Never
visit a restaurant with "caveat" in its name. ** http://acm.vt.edu/~grantham/