diskless: meaning of conf/base ?

[Marco Molteni]

Hi,

lately I have been playing with diskless booting with 6.x and 7.x.
I understand how the whole /conf overriding mechanism works, and
I think it is useful.

What I am missing is the usefulness of conf/base, especially 
conf/base/etc, that diskless(8) suggests to fill with the same
etc in $disklessroot/etc.

Let me say it in another way:

conf/default/etc/ contains the overrides
conf/base/etc/    contains the base etc that is overridden by the
                  files in default/etc

since anyway below $disklessroot we have an already existing etc:
$disklessroot/ect/, and since the normal way to initialize conf/base/etc
is:

cp -Rp $disklessroot/etc/ $disklessroot/conf/base/etc

So we get 3 copies of etc that need to be kept synchronized:

/etc
$disklessroot/etc
$disklessroot/conf/base/etc

why do we need $disklessroot/conf/base/etc at all?

I know that there is the possibility to use 
conf/base/etc/diskless_remount to avoid filling conf/base/etc, but
anyway, my question remains. diskless_remount could be moved to,
say, /conf.

thanks
marco