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Date:      Mon, 10 May 2010 20:17:16 -0400
From:      Ken Smith <kensmith@buffalo.edu>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD Release 8.0 floppy images
Message-ID:  <4BE8A20C.3010708@buffalo.edu>
In-Reply-To: <201005101636.o4AGa2pF053050@fire.js.berklix.net>
References:  <201005101636.o4AGa2pF053050@fire.js.berklix.net>

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On 5/10/10 12:36 PM, Julian H. Stacey wrote:
> I'd suggest it would be good to commit & post a comment why removed.
> It will later affect rescue capability of some older servers when
> they get upgraded, (I guess many/most legacy production servers
> still are 7.*, at least till 8.1 comes out).

When I started down the pathway to removing them it was
with the intention of removing *all* mention of floppies
as part of system installation.  There are quite a few
things it would be really nice to rip out of sysinstall
(they're hindering other progress) that are there because
of floppies.  We figured it had reached the point progress
on making sysinstall better (or at least less annoying)
in various ways being hindered by floppy support wasn't
in the majority of peoples' best interest.

It turned out progressing on that isn't going as well as
hoped, pc98 has stronger ties to floppies than was originally
thought.  So, after turning off the building of floppies
things got a bit stalled on the removal of what I'll call
"floppy-isms" in sysinstall.

It's still the basic path we'd like to follow, it's just
slowed down a bit.

As for building them at all goes...  It turns out that by
mistake (a system doing automated release builds on a
regular interval) we discovered that building them now
fails due to another of the handful of reasons we wanted
to abandon floppies goes (above mentioned ripping out of
stuff was just one).  Most of the floppies involved
can go multi-volume if necessary (e.g. the mfs floppy
can span more than one physical floppy) but the 'livefs'
one can't and it recently started overflowing.

Those reasons combined with the fact I can't even test
them any more all combined to convince the developer
community 8.0 was a reasonable point to let floppy
support fall by the wayside.

- -- 
						Ken Smith
- - From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith@buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |
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