On Sun, 5 Dec 2004, Gerald Richter wrote:

>> go against the grain (or jump out of the groove, to use the metaphor I
>> was using before), then you have to be prepared to do what it takes.  :-)
>
> Sounds to me like sysinst is the thing going against the grain here, though I 
> could be wrong...

I think you are indeed wrong here - sysinst is perfectly doing what it is 
designed for: installing a base NetBSD system which is actually working.

>> What really irks me the most is that those of you who are arguing for
>> "the expert knows best so shut up and do it" kinds of knobs are
>> currently here in this thread basing your argument on a problem that
>> _nobody_ has yet been able to justify with anything other than very
>> poor and _very_ lame excuses.  Nobody has managed to even suggest a
>> valid reason for generating overlapping paritions with "sysinst" and yet
>> some of you cry foul just because you think your perceived freedoms are
>> being taken away from you.  Well they're not -- you're free to modify
>> the source or use other tools or do it by hand.  Get over it!
>
> And you sir have not been able to justify the lack of such knobs. You have

Huh? The situation is as follows: sysinst is behaving in some way, and 
someone suggested to change this behaviour. Wouldn't it be their turn to 
provide a reason why sysinst's behaviour should be changed in the first 
place?

> yet to properly justify your reasoning with anything but equally poor and 
> lame excuses, if you have even bothered to do that. I have seen several valid 
> reasons posted for overlapping partitions, but you sir seem unable to read

Pardon? Until now there was no real reason given for the need of 
overlapping partitions. In fact, the only explanation given by the people 
demanding a knob to override the disklabel check was that they had used 
overlapping partitions in the past and would like to be able to create 
disklabels with overlapping partitions from within sysinst in the future.

> And just because an over sensitive disk sanity check is annoying and should 
> be over ridable, doesn't mean some other sanity checks that are properly 
> tuned should be removed. I haven't even read anyone asking for them to be - 
> have you? Quote and reference.

Sorry, but I really think you are misguided here. IMHO, an "over sensitive 
disk sanity check" would be one which prevents you from doing something 
important and/or useful - something that would at least WORK. Overlapping 
partitions don't belong to this category. Just by the fact that the kernel 
doesn't panic when it reads a disklabel containing overlapping partitions, 
such a disklabel doesn't become correct. If you call such sanity checks 
"over sensitive", then you are wrong - IMHO.

Of course this doesn't mean that there couldn't be some kind of expert 
knob or whatever you like to call it in sysinst letting you bypass one 
sanity check here and another otherwise automated step there. But the main 
purpose of sysinst is to get a NetBSD distribution from an installation 
media onto an installation target - working. This is what sysinst is 
designed for.

> --Gerald

Bye, K&K,
T-Zee
-- 
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