From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jan 19 05:07:04 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B16BC16A4CE for ; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 05:07:04 -0800 (PST) Received: from saturn.criticalmagic.com (saturn.criticalmagic.com [68.213.16.21]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 45D0143D41 for ; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 05:07:03 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from richardcoleman@mindspring.com) Received: from mindspring.com (titan.criticalmagic.com [68.213.16.23]) by saturn.criticalmagic.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 725693BD10 for ; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 08:07:02 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <400BD685.3000906@mindspring.com> Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 08:07:17 -0500 From: Richard Coleman Organization: Critical Magic, Inc. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: stable@freebsd.org References: <20040118235148M.matusita@jp.FreeBSD.org> <20040119095453.GA43280@pc5.i.0x5.de> <20040119195826X.matusita@jp.FreeBSD.org> <200401190546.57312.skquinn@xevious.kicks-ass.net> In-Reply-To: <200401190546.57312.skquinn@xevious.kicks-ass.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: Fix make release for 4-STABLE X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: richardcoleman@mindspring.com List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 13:07:04 -0000 Shawn K. Quinn wrote: > On Monday 2004 January 19 04:58, Makoto Matsushita wrote: > >>Yes, floppies are so cheap to buy, but sometimes not handy you know. >>I believe that some of my friends said to me that "hey, I'm so tired >>to write THREE floppy images, it's so slow!" >> >>It would be technically easy to introduce splitfs for kernel/mfsroot >>(it is already there), but it also introduce an important design >>change. We should have enough time to consider that we decide the 3rd >>floppy image treats a mandatory one. > > > I suspect we will not have to deal with floppies for too much longer. > It's pretty obvious that within a couple more years they will be > completely replaced by CD-R media or similar things. So, having to use > three (or four or five) floppy images is merely a sign that floppy > disks are becoming less useful, and should not be viewed as a solution > with any permanence. Floppies will certainly be very close to obsolete > by 6.0-RELEASE, if not by the time of 5.4-RELEASE or thereabouts. > > (And, BTW, these days floppies are really not that cheap compared to > even CD-RW media, if you evaluate them on a "per megabyte" basis.) I agree with you when talking about the desktop environment. But for the server environment with many headless rack-mounted servers, I don't think that will be true any time soon. There are literally hundreds of thousands of such servers out there, and they won't be replaced any time soon. For many such folks, pxeboot is a better option, if available. But not all machines support this (although I suspect this number is much smaller than number of machines without cdrom). Richard Coleman richardcoleman@mindspring.com