On Tue, 27 Aug 1996 19:05:46 -0700 
 "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> wrote:

 > 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.

Well ... that code needed ... a _lot_ of work, and in the face of other 
changes, wasn't really correct ... I didn't have time to put the work 
into it, so I punted on it ... I still have the changes, but they don't 
work at the moment ... (ever since cfattach happened...)

It did support disabling, but the interface between the busses and 
userconfig() left a bit to be desired ... it was also "prompt as you 
go"-based, rather than "shell-oriented"... and there wasn't any way to 
jump in and out ... it, quite literally, was a 30-minute hack :-)

In the mean time, Mats O Jannson has implemented something similar.  His 
is a lot more complete, and has been committed to the OpenBSD source 
tree... I've glanced at the code, but, in light of having _way_ too many 
things on my stack right now, haven't gotten much further than that...

Evaluate it, and possibly integrate it into NetBSD and send a PR, gosh, 
that'd be neat.. (hint, hint :-)

 -- save the ancient forests - http://www.bayarea.net/~thorpej/forest/ -- 
Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                          Work: 415.604.0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                                Pager: 415.428.6939