In article <9403012034.AA08599@sail.uwaterloo.ca> Gregory Kritsch <gkritsch@sail.uwaterloo.ca> writes:
> An additional note to the original idea - is a similar scheme possible for
> MS-DOS floppies, which could be plugged in through the d partition of the
> WD sector format driver?

Skipping sectors can't be done through the partition system unless you
want to skip them at the beginning or end of the disk, because the
partition scheme makes the assumption that the partition will be
contiguous on the disk. It might be possible to implement this with
additional hackery between the disklabel stuff and the driver, but if
you're going to do this it might as well just be in the driver and
selected by a bit in the minor device number.

> I'd like to say that, in general, all the ideas that have been discussed so
> far about floppy disk drivers have been very interesting.  Everything from
> the just fake a disklabel for the whole disk through to floppies that have
> multiple partitions (hey, can anyone think of a way to make a BSD partition
> look like a file on an AmigaDOS disk - might be useful for the installation
> distribution).  Even the idea of uniquely identified disks being placed in
> multiple drives was interesting, if (again, in my opinion) a little impractical
> in some situations (and no, please don't argue the point with me).

My concern here is that we're falling prey to creeping featuritis,
and worrying about neat but marginally useful features instead of geting
a basic, clean system going first. Is being able to partition a floppy
really useful? Is having a BSD partition in a AmigaDOS file really
useful? Seems to me it would be HARDER to work with. We can mount
floppies from either system on the other system right now (well, soon
now), adding another level of encapsulation only makes things more
complex for no real gain.

-- 
Ty Sarna                 "As you know, Joel, children have always looked
tsarna@endicor.com        up to cowboys as role models. And vice versa."

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