> From: Simon Raahauge DeSantis <xiamin@ghostpriest.rakis.net>
>
> I was waiting for the base.tgz to install on my zip drive today, and I
> realized that it was installing all the junk under /usr/share as part of
> that.
> I have another machine running NetBSD already and I was planning to nfs a
> lot of stuff since a zip drive is so small, stuff like /home and /usr/share.
> Since /usr/share is designed to be the same across machines (shareable,
> right?) wouldn't it make sense to not include /usr/share in base.tgz and
> make a seperate share.tgz, recommending that for a basic installation people
> install both? It'd be a bit more flexible even though maybe the majority of
> people wouldn't be nfs mounting /usr/share from another machine anyway.
> Since for most reasonable installations you need to install multiple
> tarballs anyway, I don't think this would be a huge inconvience.

I agree. When making a CD, it's a drag to run out of space (and I did)
while knowing that we are writing usr/share bits over and over again.
Plus, because of the size, we are a difficult ftp site to mirror.

This has been on my "it would be nice if..." list for a while. We would
need to tweak the tree a little, the man pages are _supposed_ to be generated
the same way for all ports, but not everyone understands this and some
people still write Makefile's that conditionally descend into directories
with man pages. Sometimes a different version of the same program is used,
and the man page isn't installed an extra level down like it should be.

Anyway, this would save 11 MB * one less than the number of ports with
distinct userland sets. That's enough to make the complete NetBSD distribution
fit on one CD.

	Ross.Harvey@Computer.Org