On Mon, 7 Oct 1996, Henry B. Hotz wrote:

> Using the Apple partition map also allows you to share a single disk among
> MacBSD, MacOS, and A/UX (and MkLinux for that matter).  Since these are the
> systems we are most likely to share disks with I actually like the current
> set-up.  It also means that the needed information is only stored in one
> place and therefore cannot inconsistent.

If I understood the previous post correctly (which is definitely
possible), the changes would cause it to look for an Apple disklabel and,
upon failing to find one, use a BSD disklabel, making it compatible with
both formats.

Somehow I suspect that using native disklabels would also require a
NetBSD-side format program to trash the Apple Partition table, if you
wanted to use BSD disklabels, otherwise the disklabel prog would find the
Apple table and read from and write to it.  Either that, or I guess you
could just put a --force_native option for the disklabel command....  That
could be messy, though.  Thoughts on that, anyone?

> However I am not sure why any of this is relevant to the IWM driver effort.
> I want floppy support mainly so I can trade disks with Mac's and PC's.  Is

Well, I'm not sure if native disklabels are absolutely necessary for
floppies, but if somebody's working on the floppy support anyway, I guess
it makes sense to do everything at once.  Not to mention the fact that it
is preferrable to use a fs that supports longer filenames than pc's and
supports upper and lower case filenames as being distinct, unlike the Mac.
If I understand the tar format, it's not mountable, and files are added
and deleted with tar, are they not?  Wouldn't it just be cooler to be able
to cp the files to /floppy or whatever?  BTW, hfs support for floppies
would be really nice.  And PC would probably be comparatively easy, given
linux's existing code for dealing with MS-DOS hard drives (and maybe
floppies?).  Thoughts?

Cheers,

 /---------------------------------------------------------------------\
|David A. Gatwood             And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,  |
|davagatw@mars              Went home and put a bullet through his head.|
|dgatwood@nyx.cs.du.edu              --Edwin Arlington Robinson         |
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