[Cc'ed to current-users, since there are people making CDs for use
  with sysinst on other ports than i386.]

 Darren Reed writes:

>Ah.  Well, my suggestion would be that it'd work something like this:
>
>- you tell it what release you're installing (i.e. NetBSD-1.3,
>  NetBSD-2.0, etc)
>- you tell it where you're installing from (ftp/NFS/cd-rom/HD)
>- you tell it where to find the NetBSD-1.3 directory if it is via NFS
>  or FTP (e.g. ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub if /pub/NetBSD-1.3 was the top
>  of the tree there)
>- or if it's mounting via CD-ROM or HD, NetBSD-1.3 would be expected
>  to be in the "top directory" of that device so that sysinst could
>  (say) mount it as /mnt and find the installation in /mnt/NetBSD-1.3.

AFAIK sysinst can do all of these already.  The misfeature is that the
default for CDs is /Release/NetBSD-1.3, which gets mounted under
/mnt2, so the default CD installation looks for a release(7)
hierarchy under /mnt2/Release/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.3.

This wasn't my idea, btw. I solicited input for more practical names
from people interested in curring CDs and we didn't get any.  You'd
have to ask someone else why "/Release" is in that path


>btw, can I compile sysinst for 1.3 on 1.2 or a late 1.2<alpha> ?

No idea about 1.2.  I doubt it'll run if it builds; I dont know if all
the relevant disk geometry ioctls were present.

If you mean 1.3<alpha>, not 1.2<alpha>, sure, you can build sysinst.
However, sysinst compiles the host OS version into its default
pathnames, so you will want to frob osrelease.sh in your source
hierarcy.  If it were me, I'd wait a couple of days, install 1.3.1,
and build on (and from) that.