On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 02:53:02PM -0500, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
  | On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 05:22:01PM +0000, David Laight wrote:
  | > But since such a filesystem cannot be used until the new kernel is built
  | > the toolchain shouldn't need makefs.  If we are going to populate the new
  | > filesystem we have to be running a kernel that knows about it - and
  | > hence we can (presumably) use the native makefs.
  | 
  | I'm speaking out of turn, since I'm nowhere near the people
  | importing makefs into the toolchain, but I think that it's wanted
  | there in order to make the creation of install media during the
  | creation of a release/snapshot simpler. (It does. makefs really
  | rocks. Play with it some time. Then go thank Todd for it. :^>)

Well, thank Luke for makefs, since Luke wrote it; thank Todd for the
funky toolchain stuff.  Then thank Perry, for paying Luke & Todd :)

makefs is quite useful in building and *populating* NetBSD ffs
file systems for install media (e.g, floppies, miniroots, etc),
possibly on non-NetBSD hosts, without needing root privileges.

At the moment, the building of install media for a release requires
root (for vnconfig(8)), and a system with vnd (such as NetBSD).

A lot of work has been occuring in the NetBSD source tree to
allow building of releases from the NetBSD-current source tree,
on a non-NetBSD current system, as an unprivileged user, without
having to update your system's /usr/include, /usr/lib (et al),
because that might not be appropriate.

Consider:
	- building a NetBSD-current sparc64 release on a NetBSD 1.5
	  i386 machine.
	- building a NetBSD-current arm32 release on a 12 CPU
	  Solaris/sparc build host, without having root privileges
	  on that host

There are many other possibilities.

We're also considering adding other back-end file system support into
makefs(8), such as iso, ext2fs, FAT32, etc.  This will occur as I get
the spare time, or someone pays us to do it in a shorter time frame :-)


  | > I can't see a valid use for makefs until you are running with the new
  | > kernel.

See Above.


  | Todd's made a temporary fix (pulling makefs back out of the build
  | process till it's fixed up to build regardless of the host OS)
  | which should appear on anoncvs the next time it's synched. (No,
  | you didn't miss a public announcement, go query the PR.)

Yes, Todd fixed it appropriately until I fix the tools/makefs version
of makefs to compile on non NetBSD-current systems.

Luke.

--
Luke Mewburn  <lukem@wasabisystems.com>  http://www.wasabisystems.com
Luke Mewburn     <lukem@netbsd.org>      http://www.netbsd.org
Wasabi Systems - NetBSD hackers for hire
NetBSD - the world's most portable UNIX-like operating system