> Part of my point (which perhaps I did not make clear) is that some of us
> are neurotic (or have lousy partitioning SW, or whatever) and may want to
> control the resulting BSD partition map in a way that may not be allowed by
> the MacOS partitioning software.  Given good MacOS software, and no
> filesystem types that can't be specified by it, and bug-free translation I
> see no *need* for our own disklabels.  I just think we are giving up a
> degree of control that *might* be useful, and *might* be easy to get.

How about this for an idea on how to give people more control over
partition types: add a menu option to mkfs to have it change a partition
to be a root partition or a usr partition. As I recall, mkfs gave a
full list of all the partitions on the drive (It's been a while, so
I might be wrong). Letting it fix up partition types would insulate people
from stupid partitioning software (a problem I ran into too), and also
let you get EXACTLY the partitions you want. Just make MacOS partitions
the way you want, and then have mkfs turn them into NetBSD partitions.
:-)

In the long run, I don't disagree that we should be able to write "native"
disklabels, but I think we need to fix things so that "native" and
MacOS partition tables co-exist cleanly. Also, it shouldn't be hard to
gain the ability to write MacOS partiton tables too.

This really is a NetBSD issue, as once we abstract things to handle
two disklabel types, we should be able to deal w/ multiple disklabel
types. Pipe dreams for the future. :-)

Take care,

Bill