On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 01:26:11AM +0100, Brad Knowles wrote:
> >  I was very happy when it turned into a mount option. Because *I do* change
> >  it quite often.
> 
> 	I believe that the only reason for this is that softupdates 
> under NetBSD is not well implemented, and therefore is not 
> sufficiently stable to leave turned on.  If/when the NetBSD 
> implementation is brought up to the levels where it is under FreeBSD 
> that this will be much less of a problem.
> 
> 	Moreover, the /etc/fstab file is not something you want to 
> munge, and encouraging frequent modifications of this file to enable 
> or disable softupdates is an incredibly bad idea.

Looking at your original piece of mail, I concluded that either
you subscribe to a Bernstein-like philosophy that, once a piece of
software has been written, it cannot be amended in any way except
by its author (strange for a piece of software released - eventually
- under a BSD licence), or you were looking for a fight.

It would appear, from the text quoted above, that it's the latter,
as you are now trying to play a "my BSD is better than yours" kind
of game, which is inappropriate for a technical mailing list. (FYI,
it's also the wrong mailing list - this mailing list should be
devoted to "discussion of issues specific to NetBSD on Sun's 32-bit
Sparc based machines (NetBSD/sparc).")

If you don't have anything technical to contribute, please take your
prejudices to the approriate forum.

Obscure technical bit: personally, I like the /etc/fstab option
*MUCH* better than a "boot -s; tunefs ...; mount -u /" for changing
the setting of softdeps. It would seem that Solaris 8 uses a mount
option too.

Alistair