[ On Tue, December 22, 1998 at 05:09:37 (-0800), Curt Sampson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: major hier(7) overhauls?
>
> On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, Shyeah right.  What am I gonna do with a gun rack? wrote:
> >
> > However, if you don't merge / and /usr, putting / and /usr on the same
> > physical partition is actually quite silly.  If you have the space to
> > do it, why not merge them?
> 
> Well, for a start it makes it a lot more difficult to copy /, being
> a minimal bootable system, to /altroot (on another disk, of course)
> for use when you really trash your system....

It depends on what you mean by "a lot more difficult".  If you mean that
you have to dedicate a bunch more space, then yes, that's true.  On the
average CISC machine you can get away with / and /altroot being only
about 15-30MB, where merging them requires perhaps a minimum of 90-100MB.

> I think it's important to keep in mind that there are systems out
> there (such as Sun 3s) for which there's often no easy alternate
> boot method. If your drives are screwed, you're screwed. There's
> no floppy, and you may not be able to add a tape easily.

You can always add a tape to a sun3 if you already have a disk, assuming
you've got an appropriate tape drive to add.

I've never met a sun3 that wouldn't netboot either, assuming you've got
a network and a machine to boot from.

Some sun3's will even boot from SCSI CD-ROM, assuming you've got a drive
and bootable media.

Personally I'd call anyone who didn't have either a tape, or enough disk
to spare another 100MB, or a network and other machine capable of being
a server, a crazy fool.  Of course a crazy fool type of person could put
only the minimum of the binaries and other things in /altroot, but that
is indeed a "lot more difficult", unless of course you only put the
miniroot in /altroot.

Of course I'm not really serious about merging /usr into / in NetBSD, at
least not without complete consensus on the subject.  I just wanted to
point out that there are far more radical changes to hier(7) which at
least some people have thought about and for which there is "prior art".

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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