Subject: Re: 1.6D sysinst... [long]
To: Bob Nestor <rnestor@augustmail.com>
From: Hauke Fath <hauke@Espresso.Rhein-Neckar.DE>
List: tech-install
Date: 07/20/2002 23:07:29
At 7:27 Uhr -0500 20.7.2002, Bob Nestor wrote:
>I believe the Booter only knows about "new" type filesystems,
>but the two filesystems are similar enough that the Booter
>works on "new" filesystems that are kept fairly small.

What is 'fairly small' here?

>This has been discussed on the port-mac68k list in the
>past.  I don't think the filesystem is converted during an upgrade,

Early during the upgrade procedure, sysinst offered to upgrade my root ffs.
2002-07-06 snapshot, to be precise.

>so I'm not sure why this is even an issue for an upgrade.

If you accept the upgrade offer, and your root filesystem does not match
the above 'fairly small', your only way back is to 'newfs -O' the partition
and restore from a backup.

Since this operation is (a) not reversible and can (b) trivially be done
with a 'fsck -c' in single user mode, I propose to not offer the option in
sysinst at that point.  IMHO, a notice would be enough.

>> # Message "...first part... is finished. Sysinst has written a
>> disklabel to
>> the target disk, ..." is bogus and annoying for mac68k.
>
>The message is in the MI portion of sysinst and isn't necessary totally
>bogus.  Since the disklabel for the mac68k port is dynamically
>constructed from the Apple Disk Partition Map which could have been
>modified by the sysinst process, the message is mostly correct.

Errm... For me at least, on mac68k there is a _big_ difference between
updating a disklabel (which sysinst has no business with during an upgrade,
either) and _writing_ a disklabel. Where 'disklabel', at least for me,
denotes a BSD disklabel, which has no place on a mac68k boot disk.

I have seen sysinst trash my HFS partition before, so my trust is limited.

	hauke


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