"slice" is, as far as I know, an evil brought on us from
the PC world.  fdisk "partitions" meant that word was used
already.

In the real unix world (BSD on a PDP or Vax up to workstations
that console via a serial by default as god intended),
you have a disk.  It can have partitions - usually up to
8, sometimes now 16 (openbsd) or 100 (solaris 9).  With
250GB disks, 8 (really 6) is too few.  Esp when veritas
wants another 2 or 3.

Afaik, Mac follows the Right way:  You take a disk and
can make many partitions.  UFS, HFS, whatever.

I haven't really used the MacOS automounter, but the fstab
equivalent (NeXTStep is mutant in that regard), but it should
be pretty straightforward.

It would be helpful if apple actually had the man pages that
covered the files and commands in use.  Quite annoying, given
that BSD man pages are usually outstanding:
  if there's a file (or a map), there's a man page.

Quoting Brad Volz (bradv@affectation.org):
> I have been looking over the instructions for setting up pkgsrc on
> MacOSX, but I am not certain that I understand the (re)partitioning
> requirements.
> 
> README.Darwin contains step by step instructions for creating a UFS
> disk image, which I understand.  However, it also implies that the
> disk image will not be able to be mounted automatically at boot time.
> This seems somewhat suboptimal, but as I read on in README.MacOSX,
> there is a technique described to make a UFS partition visible to the
> automounter.
> 
> The bit that has me confused is the reference to "partition."  I am
> not sure if partition is in reference to the UFS disk image that is
> described in README.Darwin, or if partition is actually a seperate
> "slice" ( I believe that is the correct terminology ) that would need
> to be carved out from the existing one that covers the entire disk.
> 
> $ df -k
> Filesystem              1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/disk0s5             29299544  6728920 22314624    23%    /
> 
> Any clarification would be most appreciated.
> 
> Brad