Thus spake Greg A. Woods ("GAW> ") sometime Today...

GAW> > Can you say "RPM"?  I knew you could.
GAW>
GAW> What the hell does that have to do with anything?  We are, or at least
GAW> have been, talking only about NetBSD's pkgsrc stuff here and how it
GAW> integrates into the system startup mechanisms, not anything else.

No.  In addition to talking about integrating the rc stuff (which, by the
way, I agreed made sense), you're talking about integrating pkg binaries
with system binaries I vehemently disagree with that stance.

GAW> > Keeping pkg stuff separate from system stuff is NOT IRRATIONAL.
GAW>
GAW> Maybe not to you the narrow-minded sys-admin....  :-)

This in and of itself is rude enough to make me state that I will not engage
further; however, your following paragraph needs to be addressed.

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

Point me to said "documentation".  Keeping /, /usr/local and /usr/X11
separate makes sense to me.

Boundaries are a good thing.  I, personally, don't like looking at a
plate with the salad mixed in with the chili.  If you like that kind
of thing, great, but you will find quite a few people out there who
will disagree with you.  You may even find them in the majority.

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

I dispute the "enormous controversy".  Had they had larger *and faster*
disk packs, it never would have occurred.

GAW> >  It makes
GAW> > it a HELL of a lot easier to look at a system with eyeballs than with
GAW> > special-purpose tools, the state of which may or may not be broken on any
GAW> > given day.
GAW>
GAW> Why do you need special purpose tools to look at how a system is put
GAW> together with packages?  I don't.  None of the pkg_* tools are really
GAW> special purpose -- everything they do can easily be done by hand.  They
GAW> just have the advantage of not making as many mistakes as when people,
GAW> even experts, do such things by hand!

I shouldn't have to by-guess-and-by-golly wander through, e.g., /usr/bin
and say, "Hmmm, is this going to get clobbered on an upgrade?"

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: Multi-platform OS