Date: Sun, 09 Dec 2001 18:09:20 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> Cc: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.freebsd.org>, Bernd Walter <ticso@cicely8.cicely.de>, Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>, "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>, Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net>, Kirk McKusick <mckusick@beastie.mckusick.com>, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Proposed auto-sizing patch to sysinstall (was Re: Using a larger block size on large filesystems) Message-ID: <3C141950.E809DED1@mindspring.com> References: <50925.1007888526@winston.freebsd.org> <200112090941.fB99fGV36341@apollo.backplane.com>
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Matthew Dillon wrote: > > Sigh. Look, the whole point of 'A'uto is to create a reasonable > setup for a layperson installing a system. It is not there to > cow-tow to a minimalist status-quo. It is there to give a layperson > a reasonable system that does not require him to screw around > with the infrastructure when he does reasonable things, like add an > account for themselves or install a bunch of ports or follow OUR > directions on how to retrieve, compile, and install system source. You guys are all shooting at the symptoms. What is the root cause for wanting to limit the number of partitions, and to autosize them in the first place? I would argue that it's the llack of ability to grow FS's in small sized chunks (and, perhaps, shrink them as well, but that is significantly less important, since we are talking about the installation process). If you could grow FSs in 4M chunks, as AIX can, automatically, and without serious problems (e.g. fragmentation due to layout policy applying equally across old and new chunks, as is the case when you add to an FFS), then this would be a non-issue entirely. Further, I would argue that it would make sense to install each and every software package into its own partition. Not only would this avoid the Windows problem of everyone installing their own version of MSVCRT42.DLL, or the 3D control library that argues about Unicode vs. Ole wchar_t support (and breaks things in the process), it would also make it very easy to do network mounting of particular applications onto workstations, and, if it ever came to it, license management and application access over the Internet. Need an application? Mount it. Each partition would end up being only as large as it needed to be to handle what it needed to handle. This whole idea of "making the defaults reasonable" is predicated on the false idea that fixed defaults are even necessary. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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