[ I'm going to re-direct follow-ups to this thread onto `tech-install' ]

On Wed, 4 Oct 1995 18:12:40 +0100 
 Rolf Grossmann <grossman@informatik.tu-muenchen.de> wrote:

 > This is not only machine dependent, it may even be problematic on machines
 > with a long uptime, because the boot messages may not be there anymore.
 > (On the other hand, on the Sparc the message buffer is not destroyed across
 > multiple boots, so there may be messages from more than one boot in the
 > buffer.)

Well, I think it's safe to assume that if you're running `install.sh', 
you've just booted the machine, or at least, have not had other system 
activity occur which would roll the autoconfig messages out...

Yes, on the hp300, the buffer is ... somewhat preserved (sometimes some 
junk can appear between boots).  Sometimes, this can cause, for example, 
rd0 or le2 or whatever to be listed twice as an option.  It's a stylistic 
nit at the moment, and I think right now the effort is better focused on 
making the NetBSD installation process better as a whole; we can clean up 
duplicate listings later.

As I said, the machine-dependent bits mostly live in those regular 
expressions, and are easily adaptable to other platforms.

 > I think, if you want to test the presence of a device, you should try to
 > open it for reading. If you succeed, the device is present. Unfortunately
 > you're right, this is not really possible to do with sh. Maybe we could
 > enhance test to do that?

Well, an enhancement to test(1) might be cool, something that could check 
for ENXIO, I guess...I don't know how the standards-type people might 
feel about that, but.... :-)

Eventually, I'd like to have a "nice C program with a reasonable user 
interface".  Indeed, I've put alot of thought into a nice curses-savvy 
program to do the installation.  However, a shell script is what I had 
time for right now.

..Maybe for 1.2..

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
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