On Thu, 11 Jan 1996, Jason Downs wrote:

> *This* is the broken part of NetBSD's clean flag...  Mount count might be
> easier to code, and I belive it's what most others use, but a time since
> counter would seem more useful...

It works as it was designed to work, and it doesn't cause problems; last I
checked, this qualifies as "not broken" (though one could argue "designed 
improperly").  Inflammatory words aren't likely to get things changed...

It would be most useful to implement both a count and a time, and have
some way to _turn this functionality off_.  My HP systems don't check
themselves at (apparently) random intervals when they get rebooted, and
quite frankly, I don't care if they do hose themselves.  By the time I
might have to reload the OS, they'll probably be obsolete and on their way
back to the leasing company anyway.  The same goes for my NetBSD systems;
they are cookie-cutter replicas, and if some silly little problem makes it
past the clean flag, I can get things back in working shape quickly. 
Adding a forced check every so often is liable to make my blood boil from
incessant user complaints more than it's likely to save me work down the
road. 

I really like the idea of the rc.conf, btw, but I disagree that
/etc/netstart should be removed.  I do occasionally find myself in
single-user mode and need to fetch a file from some other system, and
configuring the network with /etc/netstart is quite useful.  (And no, Mr. 
Demetriou, there is _no_ reason to have to go to init.d to do this. 
That's _BIG_ overkill. ;-)

--scott