Hello misc, there were recently some comments about customizing bsd.rd contents and making one of own's choice/taste. This reminded me about an unpleasant situation in which I found myself kinda 2 years ago:
sparc64 machine, a neglected typo in fstab while changing a disk mountpoint and boom! - no boot :( This machine was in a server room (where there was no quick possibility to setup a rarpd server to netboot bsd.rd, thing which would therefore especially apply for a customized one) and so the only solution was to use an install CD and its console. The only editing available tool in bsd.rd, the infamous ed, made me sweat cold with fear not to correctly spell its syntax or do some logic mistake. I would have been way more lighthearted if I had vi available. Btw, how many are really using ed everyday, now in 2013? I believe I'm not the only one who thinks this. My guess is that vi could be more appreciated by most of the user base more than ed. So, today, for the sake of curiosity I sshd that machine (now updated to 5.2) and examined/usr/src/distrib/sparc64/bsd.rd/list in order to look for "space" (e.g. some similar commands, but failed to, also more and less are the same file) to fit vi. This is the raw situation: /usr/bin/vi = 343320 bytes /bin/ed = 238864 bytes delta = 104456 bytes 100K of executable, when compressed, wouldn't be "that" much in terms of difference, but would have an enormous impact on user-friendlyness and flexibility of editing (funny, I never thought I would have called vi user-friendly! Anyway, compared to ed, also old DOS edlin was). So basically my proposal would be substituting ed with vi. My alternative proposal would be only adding vi just for sparc64, after all, how many sparc64 boxes do nowadays boot from a floppy disk? Most of them don't have one at all, and the ones who do, also feature a CD-ROM drive. Thanks for your feedback!
