Removal of /stand Directory

[Scott Long]

Ryan Sommers wrote:
> After a thread on current@ and private discussion following, myself and 
> the other party were in agreement that /stand serves no purpose after 
> the initial install. Most of /stand is duplicated in /rescue with the 
> exception of a few members. This makes the approx. 3mb of space consumed 
> by /stand wasted space.
> 
> The only post-install dependency on /stand I can find is the diskless rc 
> script. This script uses /stand/cpio and /stand/gzip for unpacking 
> template archives to populate memory disks. I have come up with two 
> solutions that would solve this problem. The first involves /bin/pax and 
> moving gzip to /bin/gzip. This would be enough to unpack archives for 
> diskless systems. The other is to use /rescue/tar and /rescue/gzip.
> 
> Currently /rescue uses gtar, however, this will likely be switched to 
> bsdtar after 5.3-RELEASE (see PR bin/72549). This will add cpio and pax 
> support to /rescue/tar (in addition to saving approx. 40k). I don't 
> believe using /rescue is the correct solution for diskless systems.
> 
> Which is why I propose moving gzip to /bin. This would increase /bin by 
> about 46k. However, upon removing /stand the net would be a savings in 
> the root partition. /bin/pax and gzip are capable of handling the 
> diskless template archives and will also be updated as part of world to 
> receive any bugfixes.
> 
> If people agree with this, after providing patches for moving gzip to 
> /bin I plan on addressing sysinstall to have /stand removed as part of 
> the post-install cleanup/configuration. And then after I'd like to work 
> on bringing our support and instructions for diskless environments up to 
> date with 5.X.
> 
> Anyone have any thoughts, objections, feelings on this? If anyone has 
> already started work on this but doesn't have the time let me know and 
> I'd be happy to pick up where they left off. Otherwise I'm willing to 
> put in the grunt work if anyone is willing to help commit it once 
> 5.3-release is out of the way.
> 

I think that this is generally a good idea.  On a larger scale I'd like 
to see the disc1 installer become a full live filesystem so that stand
isn't needed at all.  Any interest in helping with that?

Scott