Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Thursday 08 January 2004 18:20, Avleen Vig wrote:
> I understand it is difficult to maintain the floppies. I wish I
> understood them better :-) Is it not possible to have "ftp install"
> floppies, which do nothing more than simple FTP installations?

It wouldn't make it any easier.

You still need the right drivers, ie which SCSI controller/network/... cards 
you have to get a minimal install is _more_ when you are doing FTP (you need 
a network).

I think one possibility that wasn't mentioned is to have a floppy maintainer 
that generates several sets of floppies that are used for non-CD 
booting/no-CD installs which are available via download, and some are chucked 
on the CD. ie make it a separate part of the release, so it is not directly 
the install team's job.

This would mean that the default 'make release' produces no floppy images. 
Instead they are built separately and bundled with 'official' releases. It 
would even be (fairly trivially) possible to setup a web site where you 
select what cards you want support for and it makes a floppy image for you. 
Even just having a page which tells you want card needs what KLD and where to 
get the KLD's would help, as you could download them on your <other OS> and 
put them on floppy yourself.

Scott also said stuff like SCSI cards won't get probed if a module is loaded 
but I can't see why that is true.. The module will load, the device get 
detected, and then sysinstall is told to reprobe the hardware, so it should 
pick it up.

I see the 'which kld goes with what device' problem as separate to this issue. 
The KLD load stuff DOES show a small description for each KLD so it isn't a 
total black box, and heck, you can just pick everything and cross your 
fingers :)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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