> ...
>   | I think that it was to remain consistent with what DEC does.
> 
> Personally, I think it should be consistent with what NetBSD does.

The question whether being consistent with the original system or with
other ports is more general, and shows in areas more important than the
background color of wscons.

For example, the boot flags on alpha. There is an 'a' flag, which is
required to boot to multiuser, for compatibility with Digital Unix, I
believe. This is often confusing for newbies - including myself ("how do
I get out of singlew-user mode?") and causes incompatibility with the
i386 port, where -a is used to ask for root device. Another problem of
this type is that -c is used in the alpha port to force immediate
crashdump, which AFAIK doesn't have an equivalent in other ports and
occupies the letter used for userconf(4) elsewhere. This is probably the
only reason why userconf(4) is not supported on alpha. I once compiled
it in the kernel and patched machdep.c to invoke userconf when given the
-c flag, and it worked perfectly. Some consistency would be certainly
good.

Bye	Pavel