On Sun, 30 Sep 2001, Feico Dillema wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 08:09:58AM -0500, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > On Sun, 30 Sep 2001, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 01:44:22PM +0200, Tomasz Luchowski wrote:
> > > > Does anyone use uucp these days? I have never used it, and I like
> > > > the idea of removing obsolete (at least from my point of view) software.
> > >
> > > Yes, me. Couple of other NetBSD developers, last this question was raised,
> > > and handful other people at least I know.
> > >
> > > If, one day, the base system is pkg-ed in a fine-grained way, factoring
> > > taylor-uucp out would look acceptable to me.
> >
> > I agree. "Obsolete", to me, means non-working and unmaintable, whereas
> > uucp is stable, working, and requires minimal ongoing maintenance.
> > As other BSD's drop it, that's even more of a reason to keep it.
>
> Whether it is obsolete or not, is not the question here. Fetchmail is
> not obsolete either, nor is gnome or whatever. However, that's no
> reason to have those in the NetBSD base system. Question is whether a
> large enough fraction of newly installed NetBSD systems actually
> have any use for it ever, and how high the price of its absence
> is for those that do need it, to warrant its appearance on
> *all* installed systems.

That's not the only question. The separate question is, can we count
on anyone else to maintain in such a way that it still works on
NetBSD? Maybe we can, but I resist ripping things out for that reason.
It's awkward and inelegant to maintain software as patches to a
distribution, and especially bad once the distribution disappears.

Fine grained base packages would be the ideal solution, in that we
could still retain the source in the repository without requiring
everyone to have it installed.

Frederick