On Sat, 11 Apr 1998, Michael R Zucca wrote:

> Didn't realize the problem was that deep. I thought we simply couldn't
> write disklabels. Ugh! These are problems that can be fixed by folks who
> don't need driver writing / hardware hacking skills (*hint* a wider audience
> of programmers should be able to work on this, not just us "hardware gurus")
> 
> Is this problem being discussed on the "general" kernel list?

Charles discussed adding "slices" as a way of doing this, and also as part
of a better system for supporting MBR disklabels.

> However, my point was that we could build an installer utility ourselves.
> Building a read-only utility should be signifigantly easier than one that
> has to write as well. All we'd need is an HFS ls, cat, and copy to do installs.
> There's that ancient HFS program from the Alice days that is basically a
> read-only tool which did both ls and copy. We'd still need cat so we could
> pipe the output to tar and gzip.

I'd say we should just get a port of hfsfs (Paul Hargrove's hfs util)
working. Paul Goyette and I once got a different package going, but we ran
into problems with buffer cache errors. hfsfs certainly is getting a lot
of support, and it can write.

Take care,

Bill