Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 10:12:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom Bartol <bartol@salk.edu> To: Charles Henrich <henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu> Cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, hoek@freenet.hamilton.on.ca, freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 961006-SNAP comments Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.93.961009094044.2082E-100000@pauling.salk.edu> In-Reply-To: <199610091306.JAA05163@crh.cl.msu.edu>
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On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, Charles Henrich wrote:
> > > all devices which they don't have. I think it should be reworded to say
> > > "know you don't have", to prevent removal of something important ("syscons
> >
> > I think that's a reasonable point - I'll do this.
>
> Why are we forcing people who probably have no clue to go mucking with the
> device table? I've done hundreds of FreeBSD installs and the generic kernel
> has always booted just peachy with me. It seems that dumping people into a
> fairly unfriendly (granted much better than command line) device editor as the
> first thing they do is definatly not a good idea!
>
> -Crh
>
> Charles Henrich Michigan State University henrich@msu.edu
>
> http://pilot.msu.edu/~henrich
How about having two different boot floppies -- one which does the plain
vanilla GENERIC thing and one for experts which defaults to the config
editor. That way everyone is happy and if you run into a machine with a
cantankerous set of hardware you can reboot with the "expert" boot floppy.
One disadvantage of this is that it violates the elegant simplicity of
FreeBSD's "all for one and one for all" boot floppy philosophy. So on
this note, if there could be a convenient and friendly way to inform users
at boot time that they can, if need be, access a boot config editor by
hitting some key on the keyboard without cramming the editor down the
throats of others who may be confused by the editor or don't need to use
the editor then, just perhaps, everyone will still be happy and the "one
disk is all you need" constraint will be satisfied as well!!
Just a few pseudo-random thoughts (determining whether my random seeding
algorithm is adequate is left as an exercise for the reader) ;-)
Tom
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