[ On Tuesday, March 18, 2003 at 11:31:31 (-0800), Greywolf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: /usr/pkg/etc/rc.d/*
>
> Can you say "RPM"?  I knew you could.

What the hell does that have to do with anything?  We are, or at least
have been, talking only about NetBSD's pkgsrc stuff here and how it
integrates into the system startup mechanisms, not anything else.

> Keeping pkg stuff separate from system stuff is NOT IRRATIONAL.

Maybe not to you the narrow-minded sys-admin....  :-)

However history clearly shows that it is seen to be irrational to many
kinds of users and particularly to developers doing system integration.
This is not my opinion -- it's a well and widely documented fact and
it's been an issue ever since there was more than one "competing" unix
distribution.

Even the artificially driven separation of /bin and /usr/bin has caused
enormous controversy over the years.  If ken & dmr had larger disks back
in the early days, or had been forced to deal with only one disk pack,
then that separation would likely never have occurred in the first place.

>  It makes
> it a HELL of a lot easier to look at a system with eyeballs than with
> special-purpose tools, the state of which may or may not be broken on any
> given day.

Why do you need special purpose tools to look at how a system is put
together with packages?  I don't.  None of the pkg_* tools are really
special purpose -- everything they do can easily be done by hand.  They
just have the advantage of not making as many mistakes as when people,
even experts, do such things by hand!

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
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