plug-and-play heads-up notice

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

Sometime soon after the 1.1 release, I will attempt to generate a
plug-and-play system. This means that all but /var and /etc will be on
CD-ROM, and the rest will have to fit on one floppy or a hard disk partition.
Using a floppy is especially useful for students who are booting Linux in a
computer lab to perform an assignment, but are not able to leave Linux
on the system.

Package maintainers can help with this by making sure that things
that belong in /var and /etc are there, and things that can be moved to
/usr should be moved. In some cases, you may want to place a directory
somewhere under /usr and have a (mutable) symbolic link to it in /var
or /etc .

The CD-ROM filesystem has a hard space limit somewhat under 600 MB. That
means that the plug-and-play system and the package and source archive must
both fit in that space.

It strikes me that compressed man pages and compressed GNU info pages would
make the plug-and-play system somewhat smaller, at what we have established
to be a very small (Daniel Quinlan said about 1%) expense in CPU time. 
This doesn't mean that every package should install compressed man pages right
away, but I think it would be useful for package maintainers to place
compressed man pages in their packages when it is convenient for them to do so.

This will also be a bit of a test for some programs. Does the "man" program
refrain from generating cat files when there is very little space in /var?
Do the mail spoolers fail gracefully in filesystem-full conditions? What
happens to sysklogd when there's no space? And so on.

	Thanks

	Bruce
--
Pixar Animation Studios: Reality is not our business.
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