On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 09:03:49PM -0500, leam wrote:
> Picked up the CD set at Linux World yesterday, loaded it this morning
> between coffee and breakfast. After work I set up network access, loaded
> the generic kernel from the cd, and have booted off my own kernel
> compile! I wish I could claim the results were from brilliance, and they
> may be. Not mine, however.
>
> So far there seem to be some cool things and some things I don't really
> like. Overall it's well into the "great". The new kernel booted to
> hardware ping in 38 seconds. At ping +12 I could telnet in. I set up the
> telnet, ssh, and ftp access faster than the last time I started to
> refresh myself on linux.

I'm Glad things are going well.

> Downsides are small, but there. The kernel source un-tar's from /.

Hmm? No...

The path in the syssrc.tgz starts with 'usr/src/sys' - meaning that you
_could_ extract it from /, and it would end up in 'the usual place', but
you could also extract it from anywhere else, and just have a couple
extra directories to remove. i.e.:

cd /foo/bar
tar xzvf /path/to/syssrc.tgz
mv usr/src/sys sys
rmdir usr/src
rmdir usr

> This
> seems like a really bad idea. All of your source stuff should be for
> development--far away from wherever the machine actually runs. 

It's under /usr/src. How much further away would you like it?

> Someone
> might accidentally or otherwise put a file in the tgz that overwrites a
> critical system file and you're hosed.

Then the build is broken. Someone could just as easily forget to include
/etc/passwd in the install tars and cause as bad a problem.

The only 'Someone's who changes the contents of those tars are NetBSD
developers with commit privileges. If someone did make such a mistake,
it (a) wouldn't get in to a release (b) would be fixed quickly in
-current by another developer noticing the problem.

> Besides, if you remove the
> "usr/src/" parts from the tree then you can easily move it wherever you
> want. The only other bother I've hit is that the kernel source is to
> *big* to copy to / and then untar it for the default size of /. Easily
> worked around, but it just looks odd. 

Extract elsewhere, as I've shown above, or don't extract at all, if you
don't have the space...

> Well, time to go back and read some more stuff to try. To those who've
> put the documentation on the web, or have put your time and effort into
> NetBSD, thanks! You've done a great job!

Contributions to the Testimonials portion of the web site are always
welcome :-)

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
All this stuff in twice the space would only look half as bad!
					      - me