David/absolute

On Mon, 7 Feb 2000, Julian Coleman wrote:

> [- adding libahdi, library for atari disklabels, enabled on atari only -]
> 
> OK, I admit I didn't discuss it first.  Should I remove it?
> 
	It will probably be best to have a more generic disklabel library,
	in which case you'll need to rename/remove it.

> The library is a set of routines to handle the Atari native disk layout.  I
> put the routines in a library as I want (at least) sysinst and a user-land
> utility to be able to use the routines.  It seemed sensible to use a library
> rather than duplicate the code.  Perhaps I should just duplicate the code?
> 
	A library seems a very good place for this - but one library per
	disklabel format seems... suboptimal.

> I thought that the library should go in /usr, which is where all the other
> libraries go.  Should it be installed somewhere else instead?  The makefile
> only installs the library for the Atari, but the manual pages on all
> architectures.  If we want a unified m68k /usr, then the library must be
> installed for all m68k machines if it is installed on any one of them?
> 
	If it is decided to have a library for this, it should be
	installed at a bare minimum on all ports of a given MACHINE_ARCH,
	and ideally on all ports. (in /usr, with manpages).

> >From vague mumblings that it would be useful to have user-land utilities that
> are able to read other ports' disks, would it be better to turn this into a
> more general set of routines to do this?  I can do this for Atari and Sun
> (I don't have any other machines to test).  Libdisklabel?  Libahdi does use
> a header file specific to port-atari at the moment.  If a library to handle
> all the native disk labels would be useful, all the machine-dependent
> headers describing disk labels will need to be installed for all ports.

	I think this would be an excellent idea - including moving
	disklabel describing headers into an MI location.
	You may also want to look at pulling in mbrlabel.

> PS.  A more appropriate mailing list would be ... tech-userlevel?

	Seems very reasonable - have cc'ed this, and set reply-to: :)