On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Donald Lee wrote:

: The trouble with the install on that machine was not the kernel, but
: the strangenesses in the OF that made the floppy and CD at the very least
: hard to use.  The MacOS install step would simply
: reduce the number of hurdles to getting the kernel on a medium
: (SCSI disk) that will boot.

However, sysinst already supports mounting a foreign filesystem to grab the
tarballs.  We're planning to try to get some kind of HFS[+] filesystem
available, and once that's done, you simply put the tarballs into the
foreign filesystem, and have sysinst pull from there.  You can already do
this with, for instance, a msdosfs file system -- both MacOS and NetBSD
support that.

There's no need to go through trying to create a 4.4BSD ffs filesystem from
the MacOS side; that's overkill, and extremely difficult to maintain through
-current, as the mac68k people have already found out.

Sysinst encapsulates the logic of actually doing the install/upgrade and
setting up the OS (the *really* important part).  Having tools that allow
you to prepare partitions, stash tarballs locally, etc. from the MacOS side
are fine, but it's sysinst's job to make sure the install works correctly.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  Wasabi & NetBSD:  Run with it.
-- CDs, Integration, Embedding, Support -- http://www.wasabisystems.com/