From: John Baldwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: Labeling Vinum partitions in the sysinstall(8) [patch]
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2001 09:28:31 -0800 (PST)
> Heh, I wrote http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/patches/sysinstall.vinum.patch
> probably a year ago now, but because it only changes the disklabel editor and
> doesn't add a full vinum configurator the patch was rejected. :-/ Hopefully
> you will have better luck than I did...
Well, I'm not sure it was "rejected" so much as "sent back with a set
of requests attached."
The problem here is that vinum is currently a feature which isn't
"exposed" to the general public - you need to be someone who's
interested in tracking down the details and doing some reading before
you can create a vinum-based filesystem. That's good in this
particular case because vinum is hardly a trivial piece of work and
you'd better read up on it before using it or you're probably going to
end up doing nasty things to your system.
This is not to say that vinum wouldn't substantially benefit from a
lot of front-end work which removes a lot of the confusion and hair
from the process, indeed I think that would make vinum a lot more
popular and useful, but all the Baldwin/Sobolev patches do is
essentially draw an arrow which leads over the cliff. :-) They don't
front-end the process enough that someone completely unfamiliar with
vinum will be able to do the right things.
For the person who *already* knows what vinum does, these patches make
initial setup a bit easier, I don't dispute that at all. There are a
lot more people than the vinum masters who use sysinstall, however,
and those folks are going to be going "what's this? Should I select
it? What do I do after that?" In short, it only opens a big can of
worms for them.
In short, I think these patches are a good start but only about 1/10th
of the work necessary to truly bring vinum support into sysinstall.
As a 1/10th effort, I also consider them to be something to be passed
around amongst various hackers interested in providing the other 9/10
but nothing to actually expose end-users to right now. That's why
your (John's) patches went back with comments attached and I've
merely been waiting for you to finish them. ;)
- Jordan
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
