> userland should stay the same.  make snapshot may have to be tweaked to build 
> kernels from multiple places, but that should be possible.  May have to 
> rename the kernels from GENERIC to CATS_GENERIC.

Having just installed 1.5 on my SHARK tonight and slapped my forehead after
getting the good ol' Data Abort that means "replace GENERIC with netbsd.SHARK"
I would have to say that this already made sense under the old "monolithic"
arm32 port.

I wouldn't mind if sysinst understood how to install ports other than its own,
as long as the MACHINE_ARCH was the same -- that's what we would have done to
arm32 if we had given up on the port split ever happening. (Eventually, some
of us want sysinst to be capable of installing any port from any other port;
a worthy long-term goal regardless.)

After dealing with the symlinks on ftp.netbsd.org recently while installing
a couple 1.5 systems, I'm starting to be of the opinion that we should set
a long-term goal of inverting the directory structure so that truly MI stuff
shows up at the top level, MACHINE_ARCH stuff is placed one level down, and
MACHINE stuff is placed one level below that. That way it's absolutely clear
that we share things.

Something else I have been thinking about lately is running tests so that
when we build snapshots, the redundant bits are checked against each other.
This ensures that we have not goofed by sharing bits when they really aren't
redundant, and helps us find the variations (so we can fix them!).

> I don't think any have been yet, but I don't see that it's worthwhile to work 
> on that till the split is done, and we've got a near final directory 

Granted. I just wanted to raise the flag now and get people thinking about it
early rather than late...

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com