cvs commit: src/release/alpha drivers.conf

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 14 May 2003, David O'Brien wrote:

> On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 01:15:45AM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > > > >   Modified files:
> > > > >     release/alpha        drivers.conf 
> > > > >   Log:
> > > > >   The alpha drivers floppy is overflowing. Remove firewire support,
> > > > >   which is not common on Alpha anyway. Time to have > 1 driver floppy it
> > > > >   appears.
> ...  
> > > To make it work, we need to add a 4th floppy (2nd driver floppy).  Is
> > > this the route we really want to take?
> > 
> > In SCO, there used to be a lot more drivers floppies, categorized by
> > their use, Mass Storage, Networking, etc.  Why not?
> 
> I strongly feel floppies should be de-supported. 

I think they'll be needed for i386 for a while yet, but when it comes to
the newer 64-bit platforms, I tend to agree.  I don't even know if you can
buy a sparc64 box with a floppy drive at this point...  It's hard for
me to imagine anyone shipping an ia64 or amd64 machine with a floppy
disk drive but without a bootable CDROM...

The temptation for Alpha would be to de-support floppy installs on that
platform, assuming there are no serious objections in a poll of alpha@
developers and users, since it's one of the impediments to keeping the
release build on that platform running, and it really doesn't need any
more impediments if we can help it :-).  I'd rather invest our developer
energy elsewhere, if we can.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories