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At Mon, 02 Jul 2007 05:48:00 -0500, M Graff wrote:
Subject: Re: Adding new programs, like tcpdrop
>=20
> Along this path lies insanity.

Well, no, not really.  Certainly care and reasoning must be well used,
but there are certainly some extremely fundamental low-level tools which
NetBSD is sadly still lacking.

For example for an operating system that highly values networking, not
having some of the most basic of network pipe-fitting and diagnostic
tools is quite astounding.

There are also many tools useful in production quality operational
systems that would be extremely handy to have integrated into every
generic NetBSD install, even the most basic.

Just because NetBSD is a useful platform upon which to build embedded
systems doesn't mean that the generic install should be as stripped down
bare as the most minimal of embedded systems.

In some ways your argument is a poor as one saying that taking something
away from NetBSD would lead to the slippery slope of stripping the basic
generic NetBSD install down to one suited only for embedded systems.

Would you prefer that we go back to the practices of the early Bell
Laboratories folks and simply remove all trace of any program that
hasn't been used by some representative set of users in, say, the last
six months?


> Please, let's try to put together a
> "standard" install that uses the output of pkgsrc to install all these
> cool widgets, and not add them to /usr/src.

That'll be a fine thing to do once we have the whole system using
pkg_install to bootstrap itself, and once we have full binary packages
available at exactly the same time new releases are available and for
all the many platforms NetBSD is available on.

People who argue for this kind of thing seem to fail to realize that
NetBSD just isn't being supported by anyone near the size of RedHat and
that without a huge level of commercial support it's just about
completely impossible to make timely releases of full systems and full
sets of binary packages in the way that RedHat do, even for one
platform, let alone the many dozen supported by NetBSD.

It really is critical that important core tools be directly integrated
into the base NetBSD system, and be maintained as NetBSD components, be
they 3rd-party sources or not.

For example I've been adding one variant or another of netcat to my
source tree for quite a few years now.  I should be adding a real
mode-less text editor too!  ;-)

--=20
						Greg A. Woods

H:+1 416 218-0098 W:+1 416 489-5852 x122 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>       Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>

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