Dear all,

I feel like this has come up before, but a quick search didn't reveal anything terribly recent, at least.

The new installation chapter of the handbook for 9.0 (that Warren and Glen and Garrett and Gavin and more people I am probably missing have sunk huge amounts of time into) has instructions on (e.g.) preparing a USB stick install image: http://www.glenbarber.us/FreeBSD9/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-pre.html (scroll down most of the way).  But in order to do so, the instructions include 'sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16'!  Now, an ordinary user who is doing this for the first time might ask, "why do I need to do something with 'debugflags' in order to make a USB stick?  I'm not debugging anything, this is a standard operation!".

I can't really advocate for changing the geom logic at this point in the release cycle (though it's not really clear why rank 1 geom providers need to be so special), but I think it would be nice to have a user-visible interface to it that does not have "debug" in the name, since the actual flags are apparently here for the long haul.  I could certainly imagine aliasing the debugflags to just "flags", which seems more innocuous-sounding.

Does this sound crazy?