On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 11:13:11AM -0800, Chuck Silvers wrote:
> however, the use of high minor numbers to represent normal disks is
> a currently supported feature of the official NetBSD distribution,
> and changing the interpretation of the minor number would break that.

Can you name one piece of software that uses this 'feature'?

> the fact that people want this feature right now does not justify
> making incompatible changes that are clearly not the best solution.

Incompatible with something that noone does. Besides, when a better scheme
comes around, it will very likely not be compatible with that hack too,
so you'll lose either way.

Maxpartitions being 8 on the i386 has been a complaint for several years
now. A better scheme will very likely not be in the next release (it
has been discussed, but noone has set out to implement it), which
means that for at least a year to come, official NetBSD releases will
not have it. I don't think it's good to deny our users having > 8 partitions
on the i386 port for that long, just because someone somewhere might
have decided to use a hack involving higher bits of the minor device
number (and I very much doubt anyone has).

If you want to discuss how to do it properly (i.e. look at wedges again),
I'm all for that, of course.

- Frank