On Sun, Feb 27, 2000 at 12:47:25AM -0500, Chris Tribo wrote:
> on 2/27/00 12:26 AM, gabriel rosenkoetter at gr@eclipsed.net wrote:
> > Is "there's no tape drive and no other free disk" enough?
>     Yes :) And writing to the network is faster than writing to tape anyway.

Natch.

>     Only B&W G3's on up have updateable firmware. Honestly, (personal
> opinion) I wouldn't be surprised if the OF simms actually had "flashrom" on
> them and support was never written to flash them. I have some DECstations
> here that were designed in 1991 and they have flashroms, but DEC never wrote
> anything to fix them.

Well, I guess my ass-old OF is good enough for now, then.

> > Oh, wait, I get it... build the new kernel with the current system,
> > boot from the floppy, install the packages (minus kern and etc), move
> > the new kernel over (presevering my 1.4P one).
> > 
> > If that's what you meant, that makes a lot of sense to me.
>     Yep, that's what I meant.

Cool.

> > (Judging by what scrolls across the screen during a mac68k install -
> > one of which is going on right behind me - I don't need to worry as
> > none of the tar balls have anything destined for these directories.)
>     I would hope that tar (pax in the install?) is smart enough not to
> overwrite files with an empty directory :)

Yep, on both counts. (It's pax and it doesn't overwrite - just did
exactly this method of update with mac68k on a machine I cared less
about preserving.)

>     sysinst will make the device files for you automagically with a fresh
> install, I don't remember if you do an upgrade what it will do. Wouldn't
> hurt to make sure you have devices by mounting your root to /mnt after the
> install to check. Booting a system with no device files doesn't make NetBSD
> happy :)

My concern is less that I have no devices than that I have
incompatible ones, especially as regards tty{E|e}0 and wscons. I guess
that running MAKEDEV unnecessarily couldn't do a whole lot of harm.

Do I need to update MAKEDEV separately? There exists no dev.tgz, but
that's the kind of thing that's probably in base.tgz...

I'll wait for any "eek! no don't do that!" email and then give this a
shot tomorrow.

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net