I have walked all over Paul Richards code again, and severely lobotomized
some of his stuff, in order to cut some corners for the 2.0-Alpha release.
I belive that we can now manipulate fdisk and disklabel-stuff sufficiently
for the release to actually be produced.
It's not that I don't like Paul and his code, I just need something I
can kick out of the door RSN.
Sysinstall is now under absolute code-freeze, only Jordan has my permission
to commit to this code (stage0 & 5). I would appreciate if everybody
else would finds problems in sysinstall send patches to me, and I will
commit them. THANKYOU.
The fdisk/disklabel editors are made in pure ncurses, and follow a model
"a`la spreadsheet".
There are some important functions which are missing still, and I would
appreciate if somebody would look at them.
The FDISK part needs a "whole-disk" option, and it needs a "rewrite
MBR-boot code" option.
The DISKLABEL part needs to be able to "import DOS-partition".
Both need a "HELP" function, (display a file "/HELP" using dialog is OK).
It seems to me like the wd.c and sd.c should reread the physical record
when a DIOCGDINFO is made, so that they can pick up changes in the
MBR-data. Otherwise there will be a couple of weird cases where we
cannot avoid replicating code from the kernel.
If you want to play with this, look at src/release/Makefile. You may need
to step back to version 1.38 of sys/i386/isa/fd.c to make "rootable"
floppies, it is not clear at this time if that indeed is the problem I
have been having.
Sleep well, my friends, and expect the real Alpha in 24H, if the tree is
still solid.
