Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 16:00:45 -0800 From: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org> To: obrien@FreeBSD.org Cc: Nate Lawson <nate@root.org> Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/share/man/man4 acpi.4 Message-ID: <4032AB2D.60008@acm.org> In-Reply-To: <20040217230348.GB31288@dragon.nuxi.com> References: <20040217203852.724BE16A567@hub.freebsd.org> <20040217125043.N30568@root.org> <20040217215309.GA31288@dragon.nuxi.com> <20040217143034.B31176@root.org> <20040217230348.GB31288@dragon.nuxi.com>
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David O'Brien wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 02:32:26PM -0800, Nate Lawson wrote:
>>
>>I meant the step in UPGRADING that says "cp GENERIC.hints
>>/boot/device.hints". If people follow that, you lose local changes to
>>hints.
>
> I think it is clear that one only does the 'cp' if they are upgrading
> from 4.x to 5.x. I'm not arguing that the knob isn't better living in
> loader.conf -- just that /boot/devince.hints isn't a [auto]generated
> file[*] and we can assume it is as "stable" as one's passwd file.
>
> -- David
> [*] I can't even boot w/o my custom device.hints due to the hardwiring I
> do for SCSI devices. This file cannot become volatile.
Seems like it might be time to evaluate ways to separate
the "default hints" from the "custom hints".
/boot/defaults/device.hints, anyone?
Then the default hints can be auto-updated while allowing people
to preserve their local configurations. Personally, I've never
needed to customize device.hints and would rather it just get
auto-updated.
I've also been doing virgin installs from source lately, and
find the check-and-abort if device.hints is missing to be very,
very annoying. Can anyone explain why 'make installkernel' should
not just install a device.hints file if there isn't one already?
(I presume there's a good reason for this.)
While we're at it, I would suggest that 'cd etc && make distribution'
create a blank fstab if there isn't one already. FreeBSD currently
refuses to boot without an fstab, but will boot with an empty fstab.
With those two changes, you could create a bootable system
with just
make DESTDIR=foo installworld installkernel
cd etc && make DESTDIR=foo distribution
Tim Kientzle
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