file placement, redux
Bruce Sass <bsass@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca> writes:
> > You forget the extension.
>
> Nope, I left them off. ;)
We need to leave the .bin extensions, I think. One reason is just
that people are accustomed to seeing extensions denote the file type.
Two, it's convention with boot-floppies (ain't broke, don't fix).
Lastly, we servers ought to have the extension defined as
application/octet-stream. They usually leave default as text/plain.
> Technically, yes, safe is a special, but what would you call it if it
> was only one manufacturer's box that required the safe option...
Safe is not really a special, nor is it a subarch. Special and
subarches are actually quite similar. Basically, anything where we
need to have a different set of boot and drivers, paired, is either a
subarch or a special. Safe is neither -- it's just alternative boot
code. So I'd prefer to just have, for i386:
disks-i386/disks-1.44/rescue.bin
rescue-s.bin
(as it is now). Dignifying this with a directory is too much. Maybe
at most:
disks-i386/disks-1.44/safe-opt/rescue.bin
Then I could put the README-safe readme in there...!
> What it boils down to is that a sub-set of boxes out there have special
> requirements; whether those requirements arise because the mfg hung
> different chips off the bus, uses a different OS, or a slightly broken
> floppy drive (this is safe, as in the `safe, slow and stupid' floppy
> driver option, right) is not important.
Yes -- it kinda is. Replicating a whole dir tree just for a frob of a
value of a boot-loader, or designing around such a nusicence, is going
to confuse users. At the top level, you need to present as few
choices as possible.
> So, for all practical purposes, safe can be treated like a sub-arch
> (but only because the i386 platform is the only one that needs safe,
> clearly this would not work if every arch under alpha also had a
> safe version). Plus, doing otherwise would throw a wrench into my
> attempt at automating the generation of url entities for the docs.
I don't see how this is so for safe.... It is just something that
deserves special mention for i386 only. Again, we don't wanna design
the whole system around it.
> Having more directories to drop things into could mean that less
> information needs to be encoded into the filename;
> would that help with 8.3 compatibility?
Yes, that was the point....
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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