> There is no reason to put the mcd0 stuff in the kernel in the
> snapshot.

Why does this cause you guys so much trouble?  We've had mcd0 in our
kernels for ages and it doesn't stomp anything else.  Even if it did,
Jason Thorpe has written a perfectly servicable "kernel config"
utility along the lines of FreeBSD's boot -c option which should allow
you to simply disable mcd0 when you don't want it.  If his stuff
doesn't currently support disabling then it should be trivial to add.
FreeBSD's userconfig was a 3 hour afternoon hack for me, after which
it was more than usable for this kind of thing.  All the extra visual
bells and whistles came later.

> 2) If you are bringing the system up on floppies, you don't need the
>    device -- you can build the device in to your kernel later. If you
>    are bringing it up on a CD, the CD manufacturer can include a
>    driver in their kernel.

Oh, riiiiiiight! :-)

Needless to say, the CD manufacturer isn't going to do anything of the
kind for any of their products, to say nothing of historical relics
like the FX-001 series.  If you want people with old and funky Mitsumi
drives to be able to install NetBSD, then this driver has to work.  If
it's stomping something else, that too should be fixed or you should
get yourselves a kernel configurator thingy which lets you switch off
all the stuff (and not limited to just the mcd driver) you don't want
in the ISA device tables.  Like I said, Jason's already *done* a
prototype for NetBSD so it's not as if I'm talking purest vaporware
here.

> 3) If I had a dollar for every hour I lost because of that goddamned
>    driver being in the boot kernels...

Hey, I can't help it if you made a bad investment. :-) If you'd
invested just 2 or 3 of those hours into improving Jason's stuff,
this'd be a non-problem.

					Jordan