On Sat, 20 Jul 2002, Hauke Fath wrote:

> At 7:27 Uhr -0500 20.7.2002, Bob Nestor wrote:
>
> Early during the upgrade procedure, sysinst offered to upgrade my root ffs.
> 2002-07-06 snapshot, to be precise.
>
> >so I'm not sure why this is even an issue for an upgrade.
>
> If you accept the upgrade offer, and your root filesystem does not match
> the above 'fairly small', your only way back is to 'newfs -O' the partition
> and restore from a backup.
>
> Since this operation is (a) not reversible and can (b) trivially be done
> with a 'fsck -c' in single user mode, I propose to not offer the option in
> sysinst at that point.  IMHO, a notice would be enough.

I believe Scott Reynolds noted the same problem, with "fsck -c"
damaging a partition. I agree that "sysinstall" should simply give
notice. The last time I'd tried "fsck -c", on NetBSD 1.3?, it was a
bear, and so I'd simply given up on the old Installer, "newfs"'ing and
"restore/dump"'ing a series of new disks in the intervening period.

> >> # Message "...first part... is finished. Sysinst has written a
> >> disklabel to
> >> the target disk, ..." is bogus and annoying for mac68k.
> >
> >The message is in the MI portion of sysinst and isn't necessary totally
> >bogus.  Since the disklabel for the mac68k port is dynamically
> >constructed from the Apple Disk Partition Map which could have been
> >modified by the sysinst process, the message is mostly correct.
>
> Errm... For me at least, on mac68k there is a _big_ difference between
> updating a disklabel (which sysinst has no business with during an upgrade,
> either) and _writing_ a disklabel. Where 'disklabel', at least for me,
> denotes a BSD disklabel, which has no place on a mac68k boot disk.

I agree. It's a lie, it's alarming; you can learn to ignore it -- but
it should go away.

> I have seen sysinst trash my HFS partition before, so my trust is limited.

There was massive brain damage in the paritioning code (and still is
in netbsd-1-5, in which INSTALL notes "sysinstall" is still labeled as
experimental). See PR port-mac68k 15528, now closed.

Frederick