This is mildly moot because the latest sup includes a commented
out command to elide scratch.  :)

I would say that removing any partition would have to count as violating
the principle of least astonishment, and this *would* have bitten me the
moment I got an NFS server for the Amiga I have which has a partition
named scratch:, which would have been exported for testing, and I would
have planned to back it up over the weekend...

Which brings us to a vaguely related issue:

Is there a documented procedure for installing updates of /etc?  I haven't
installed most of /etc since pre-1.0 days, but I'm not sure what's safe
and what isn't.  Is there a good strategy here?

-s