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>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4032AB2D.60008>