>It seems that there are differences as to how to lay out the disk ;-).

Yes. That's why there's a ``custom'' menu. Frankly I've never found
the `standard' setups useful either, but they do at least give a
complete novice a system that should work.  IMHO that's the strongest
reason to not ditch them.


>I even like the layout describe in the "example" above.  What issue, I
>think, remains is what should the default for the "naive" user be.  I'd
>prefer something like this "example" than the current defaults.

Uh, feel free to suggest that to the i386 portmaster :).


>PS
>One reason I like to separate the system (/root /usr) from my code
>(/usr1 [this would include pkg, x, emacs) is so I can do an "upgrade
>by wiping /root&/usr.  What I don't like about the current upgrade
>scheme is that it just overwrites what is there (on root & usr).
So that there is a lot of dead stuff.

The old sh scripts now have a list of pathname pairs (a, b): if b
exists, remove a.  (or possibly the other way around.

This didn't make it into release(7) despite a couple of requests.
IMHO, that's a critical bug.  We're already answering `bug reports'
due to obsolete, now-broken /sbin/nfsd binaries.