Greetings!
    Apologies for the delay in replying... "holidays", "end of
year", etc.   :-(

>...so what ever came of this conversation?  I'd hate to see it die.  Can
>we agree that a unified disktab would be best?  I hate to keep mentioning
>them, but I see FreeBSD basically uses it for two purposes now:  1) Really
>old fixed disks (conner, etc), and removable media (ls120, z100, etc.)
>
>I guess the big question remains: how to overcome ufs slice boundry
>defintions on different platforms.


<shrug>  I had previously offered to combine the tables into
a single table -- stripping all the "slice"/partition information
from it in the process (since I think it only really makes sense
to track drive capacities/geometries) but that apparently
wasn't "well received"  :>

I see no need for maintaining the "slice" information and,
so far, haven't heard any justification for doing so.  The
nice thing about disktab(5) is that it is *so* peripheral
to the system that it is quite easy/harmless to replace
it entirely... which is what *I* do:
    mv /etc/disktab /etc/disktab.old
    cp ~/mydisktab /etc/disktab
    ...
This allows me to guarantee that the entries in my disktab(5)
are correct (I personally verify the characteristics of each
drive that I use) and yet keeps the original around as a
reference against which I can check new drives that I "acquire".

Since I only have about 2 dozen different drives to keep track
of here, that's not an unreasonable burden for me to bear.
(unfortunately, I am not as diligent with modemcap, printcap,
termcap, etc.  :<  )

Holly Hapidays!
--don