Regarding /cdrom in hier(7)

[Chris]

On Thu, 7 May 2020 13:23:46 +0200 Daniel Ebdrup Jensen debdrup at freebsd.org said

> After a bit of a long conversation on IRC, I've concluded that perhaps
> it's time for the /cdrom entry in hier(7) to be sent off to better
> pastures.
> 
> It's got a bit of a weird history where, before it was implemented,
> sysinstall used /mnt/dists until that was changed on the 22nd of May
> 1995, as shown on [1] - and it isn't readily apparent why it was
> changed, as presumably information from cdroms could easily have been
> extracted into /mnt/dists from /mnt/cdrom?
> 
> After then, it spent a bunch of years being hard-coded, until on
> the 22nd of January, 1997 when it was changed to fix media
> initialization, as shown on [2].
> 
> Media initialization then got moved, along with the rest of
> sysinstall, with [3], where it spent its days until [4] where
> nwhitehorn@ gave it a proper sendoff.
> 
> So my proposal is this: Do we remove /cdrom from hier(7), because at
> this point nobody should've been using it some time after 1997, or do
> we keep it around since people might still be using it?

Paint it blue! ;-)

On a more serious note. IMHO, if it counts, would be to nuke it.
Doesn't /media && /mnt already cover it's intended use case?
Even if some, even if many, still depend on it. It's fairly trivial
to add it to fstab(5). No?

--Chris

P.S. Thanks for the history, Daniel. :-)
I can still remember installing over a modem, and juggling floppy
disks -- whew! Glad those days are over. :-)

> 
> Yours hopefully,
> Daniel Ebdrup Jensen
> 
> [1]:
> https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/release/sysinstall/media_strategy.c?r1=8701&r2=8702&pathrev=8790&
> [2]:
> https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/release/sysinstall/cdrom.c?revision=21937&view=markup&pathrev=21937
> [3]: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/71150
> [4]: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/225937