Date: Wed, 01 Nov 1995 11:02:12 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: More nits Message-ID: <844.815252532@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 01 Nov 1995 12:44:54 %2B0100." <199511011144.MAA20446@allegro.lemis.de>
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[FYI to everyone else: Greg is writing an installation guide for FreeBSD] > Here are some more minor points about the October 5 cut of 2.1. Some > are important, others are just FYI. > > 1. If a CD-ROM is specified in /etc/fstab, and there is no CD in the > drive, the mount will fail and rc will abort. This doesn't make > much sense, especially for people who don't understand the > background. > > I'd like some feedback on whether you would like to change this, > since otherwise I need to talk about it in my book. This is a known bug, and it would appear that nobody is particularly keen to change it. I beat my chest about it several times and everybody involved just sort of waffled on it until the subject died down again. Until then, I may just take the automount of the CDROM out of /etc/fstab and have people do it by hand. I hate this, but I lack the time to go fix whatever stupidity it is in our system that prevents the system from coming up whenever a CDROM isn't in the drive. Unless we fix it, /cdrom is coming out of the default fstab in 2.1. Better a system that comes up without a CDROM rather than one that doesn't! > 2. The SCSI tape driver will rewind a non-rewinding tape under some > circumstances (I think it's when it detects an EOM). I have a tape > with multiple files which is readable, but the second-to-last tape > mark seems to be flaky and an 'mt fsf 3' tends to go one mark too > far. It was a real pain trying to read in the tape, since the > driver kept rewinding it. Hmmmmm! I'll let some of the SCSI hackers on our list field this one. I don't actually use tapes in my daily life, so I've no direct experience with this behavior. > 3. I'd like to see a few more things on the standard installation. > Linux "everything" really does install everything; FreeBSD > "everything" misses out things which I consider essential, such as > bash, less and emacs. The problem is that all 3 packages you name aren't distributions at all, they're packages. If you're saying that I should make up some "fake distributions" that do nothing more than try to add packages, I guess that's possible. What do the others think? There's already a package menu for adding such things yourself later (you have a pretty old SNAP there and really should be using the one that was released on the 30th of October) but I suspect you're looking for a solution that's a bit more seamless than that. > 4. shutdown no longer needs the -f option. Fine, but it could ignore > it (or print a warning) rather than failing if it gets it. Hmm.. > 5. I don't see a man page for dset. Is there any description? I'll > (possibly) kludge one if there isn't one. No man page for dset. The guy who did this one isn't big on writing man pages, which is actually bad since we should never have brought the utility into the tree without one. Any takers? > 6. The bootstrap on the floppy includes the visual editor feature, but > the bootstrap installed on disk doesn't. Is this deliberate? > Should I document it? Huh? Eh? Are you sure? For one thing, the visual editor isn't even *in* the bootstrap, it's in the kernel! I use the same kernel for both floppy and disk, so this would be seriously strange if it were really happening this way for you! I've tested it here and it works just fine in both scenarios. > 7. (Question) I can't find how to invoke sysconfig or any other > utility after the system has been installed, in order to add > additional packages. Is there a way? It's /stand/sysinstall you're looking for, and I actually make just move or link this elsewhere as part of the installation. It makes little sense to leave it in a non-standard location if it's going to be a general utility. > 8. sysconfig waits until you commit before asking what kind of > bootstrap manager you want to use. I think it should belong in the > partition editor. Please tell me if you change this one, since I > need to document it. I think you're right. Hmmm. I will have it ask you when you leave the editor, 'k? What do the others think? Jordan
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