Subject: Re: Switching i386/amd64 to native CD-based installation?
To: Bang Jun-Young <junyoung@netbsd.org>
From: Hubert Feyrer <hubert@feyrer.de>
List: tech-install
Date: 06/27/2005 16:28:17
On Mon, 27 Jun 2005, Bang Jun-Young wrote:
> Will anybody be unhappy if i386/amd64 distributions are switched to
> native CD-ROM based installation from the current floppy emulation based?

I think that before discussing a "switch", the CD-booting infrastructure 
should be done - what's status of this?

As far as I understand:
1) I understand we have some cdboot now. Not sure about documentation,
    is there some manpage for it that one can look at for operations?
2) We do not have a way to create ISO images ("makefs -t iso" / mkisofs)
    in tree yet, which is needed for this, and
3) I'm not further with the
    compressed vnd handling. If someone wants to help, let me know -
    primary action item there is to rename vnconfig(8) and vnconfig(8)
    which probably involves a lot of documentation update in addition to
    the rather small rename itself.

When at least 1) and 2) are covered and when we have ISO images created 
properly, I suggest we offer them in parallel with the floppy images for 
some time to shake out bugs, and offer CDs and the existing floppies in 
parallel for some time, until everyone's confident that the CDs work as 
expected in all regards.

And of course some "tiny" floppy images should probably be kept for a 
very long time still, to support "old" machines!

This shouldn't happen as a "let's drop install floppy support and do only 
CDs now"-switch!


  - Hubert