cvs commit: src/share/man/man4 acpi.4

[Tim Kientzle]

David O'Brien wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 02:32:26PM -0800, Nate Lawson wrote:
>>
>>I meant the step in UPGRADING that says "cp GENERIC.hints
>>/boot/device.hints".  If people follow that, you lose local changes to
>>hints.
> 
> I think it is clear that one only does the 'cp' if they are upgrading
> from 4.x to 5.x.  I'm not arguing that the knob isn't better living in
> loader.conf -- just that /boot/devince.hints isn't a [auto]generated
> file[*] and we can assume it is as "stable" as one's passwd file.
> 
> -- David
> [*] I can't even boot w/o my custom device.hints due to the hardwiring I
> do for SCSI devices.  This file cannot become volatile.

Seems like it might be time to evaluate ways to separate
the "default hints" from the "custom hints".
   /boot/defaults/device.hints, anyone?
Then the default hints can be auto-updated while allowing people
to preserve their local configurations.  Personally, I've never
needed to customize device.hints and would rather it just get
auto-updated.

I've also been doing virgin installs from source lately, and
find the check-and-abort if device.hints is missing to be very,
very annoying.  Can anyone explain why 'make installkernel' should
not just install a device.hints file if there isn't one already?
(I presume there's a good reason for this.)

While we're at it, I would suggest that 'cd etc && make distribution'
create a blank fstab if there isn't one already.  FreeBSD currently
refuses to boot without an fstab, but will boot with an empty fstab.
With those two changes, you could create a bootable system
with just
     make DESTDIR=foo installworld installkernel
     cd etc && make DESTDIR=foo distribution

Tim Kientzle