> > While people are working on how to make installation keep working as the
> > volume of data that seems to be essential rises, can some eye be kept on
> > install directly from CD (only) ...
> This is indeed a problem and I've been mumbling about it in private
> mail with Havard and Ross. I suspect that we need to think about this
> a lot more (sigh...)

If the installation floppy overflows a 2.88MB floppy, you could probably
go to a hard-disk image containing dosboot.com.  (Actually, I wonder if
the hard-disk image could just look like a gigantic floppy; all the BIOS
cares about is whether there's a proper partition table and a first-stage
boot sector.)

Can the root filesystem be an ISO9660/Rockridge filesystem?  If so, then
the boot floppy image on the CD doesn't have to contain a ramdisk kernel;
it need only contain a kernel prepared to mount a CD as a root.  The CD
can contain an extremely complete root filesystem in addition to the
compressed install sets.  Well, at least until / and /usr total more than
around 400M (they're around 150MB now including XFree86 (though only one
server)); if NetBSD gets porcine enough to exceed that, then you could
probably get by with just base.tgz, etc.tgz, kern.tgz on the first CD and
the rest of the install sets on the next CD...

Answering these obviously requires thought, but I suspect that the final
answer is that the installation process does not need to be spartan (and
thus doesn't need a lot of thought to say precisely what's "essential").

(I have a CD burner, and have even created a bootable 1.3H CD.  I might
try to find some time to try to create a NetBSD-booting "hard disk" image
if I can figure out how...)