On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 07:58:20PM +0100, Pavel Cahyna wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 04:38:07PM +0100, Geert Hendrickx wrote:
> > > What for? Just because a long time ago in such way it was made on the
> > > PDP-11?
> > 
> > Also because it's more portable than DOS/BIOS-style partitions.  
> 
> Portable as in "you can take a disk from an i386 machine, put it in an
> alpha and you'll see the NetBSD partitions"? This does not work.

It doesn't work because of a bug (ports that do not use a machine-dependent
offset for the disklabel don't look at the locations used by ports that
do).  Fixing that is about 50 lines of code, and then it All Just Works.  I
suspect nobody else commits the fixes for the same reason I never do: lack
of willingness to touch every single port's disksubr.[ch].

-- 
  Thor Lancelot Simon	                                     tls@rek.tjls.com

  "We cannot usually in social life pursue a single value or a single moral
   aim, untroubled by the need to compromise with others."      - H.L.A. Hart