Greg Woods wrote:

> [ On Sun, January 24, 1999 at 14:00:08 (-0600), Scott Reynolds wrote: ]
>> Subject: Re: major hier(7) overhauls?
>> I want to point out for the record (realizing that this is an old thread)
>> that there is still a lot of hardware that NetBSD runs on that doesn't have
>> the disk capacity to do this.  Forcing people to go out and scrounge disk
>> space is not reasonable.
>
> Show me.  ;-)

Many Macs came with 40MB or 80MB disks.  This is the key point:  I can (and
do) mount /usr via NFS from my server on one of the Macs sitting right next
to me.  If you were to merge e.g. /usr/bin and /bin, I couldn't do that any
more.  Anyway, the following bit appears to be key:

> I have lots more, lots older, hardware than most folks.  I've even got a
> SPARCstation-1 running happily with a 105MB drive (sans compiler and a
> few things like documentation, etc.), and it's all on one filesystem.

What does `all in one file system' have to do with hier(7)?  It really,
really sounds like your beef is with sysinst, not the fact that hier(7)
defines the /usr file system.  If that is in fact the case, I have no
problem with you wanting to have / and /usr on the same file system,
provided that you don't force it on everyone.

> If there was a 16-bit version of NetBSD I could probably fit it all
> comfortably on either my 67MB or 160MB SMD drive for my PDP-11, and
> since the 67MB drive is removable I'd probably use that for data.

To continue the first thought above:  There are a lot of 680x0-based Macs
running NetBSD on 80M or smaller drives.  If you judge by the number of
subscriptions to the mailing lists, the only port that has a bigger interest
is NetBSD/i386 (and this in spite of obvious shortcomings!).  Comparing
these folks to those that might hypothetically want to load it on a PDP-11
is silly.

If you want to argue for making sysinst a little more flexible, please do
so.  Just don't mess with hier(7).  Defining /usr doesn't imply a separate
file system any more than defining /root or /stand does.

--scott