[quoting damage undone]

It occurred to me that Tomoki NetBSD Mailing Lists wrote in
gmane.os.netbsd.general:

> On 5/24/05, Gary Parker <G.J.Parker@lboro.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> From: netbsd-users-owner@NetBSD.org
>> [mailto:netbsd-users-owner@NetBSD.org] On Behalf Of Tomoki NetBSD Mailing 
>> Lists
>> 
>> > is it a good idea or bad idea to turn on softdeps for the
>> > root filesystem?

I've had really bad experiences with it, from my early NetBSD days (1.5-era).
I wouldn't know if it is still valid, but back then a rootfs with softdep
would invariably receive lethal damage at the first crash. So I took on the
rule of never having a softdep /. And, like Gary said:

>> I honestly don't see what you'd gain from it. Most of the data on / never
>> really gets changed, unlike /var or /tmp for example.
>> 
> I setup up NetBSD with only one slice so everything is on wd0a

Now there's a bad idea, if you ask me. I really don't see the benefit of
doing that - aside from a "I really don't want to think about how my
partitions will work out". Honestly, it's a Linuxish thing to do, and there's
little to gain from it. In these days of multi-gigabyte harddisks, it's
not a bad thing to have a small root (I usually have 256 MB, but my main
desktop is using only 33 MB of that..), a suitably sized var (heavily
dependant on what role the machine is going to have, but 256 MB will do
just fine for desktop usage. Add more if you're planning to receive mail) and
the rest in /usr - including homedirs.

I usually end up with an mfs /tmp, too; back in those early 1.5 days it
really made a huge difference when compiling stuff (Provided you set
TMPDIR to /tmp instead of the default /usr/tmp).

And guess what, you can have softdeps on everything, except for /.

(Well, having a softdep on an mfs /tmp is pretty useless)