> What evidence do you have of newcomers being "more than often" turned > away by having to use "archaic tools"?
I visit a couple of Linux forums, and while the word "DragonFly" surely seems to have picked up some usage in the recent months, I also hear that they go somewhere else after a brief experience setting it up. Majority of these people seem try DragonFly because of HAMMER and their aim is to setup a "backup" box. > If they want DragonFly only on their whole disk, they can just let the > installer install DragonFly to the whole disk without having to use > either fdisk or disklabel. >From what I hear, people prefer to use a separate hard disk(s) instead of using the one on which they installed DragonFly initially to store their backups. So they cannot avoid fdisk and disklabel. It made me think, what advantage do we get by over-complicating things with disklabels, sectors, offsets etc? They are things that, I feel, majority of *nix users don't wanna hear about these days. I've used *BSD for a few years and while i never really had problems with disklabel(except once), it does seem kind of cool to "partition a slice", it is redundant at the same time especially now that GPT is here and it does work with existing BIOSes. I blasted away a DF disklabel by accident once(installing FreeBSD on another slice) and I didnt have backups and I managed to recover my data only partially, sure my fault..i didnt have a backup, but on the other hand I blame the disklabel to be too easy to stuff up. As I mentioned earlier, another issue they seem to find, is the non-availability of choosing BASH during the install. ------------- So, what is the real world advantage of using disklabel, that can't be done with GPT on 99.99% of all OS install? that is worth breaking compatibility with other *BSDs - each BSD implements disklabel differently- and other OSs like Linux - doesn't use disklabel at all but for Linux to support reading/writing to HAMMER or UFS, it would have to implement some basic disklabel support. Petr
