Hello.

I use NetBSD for a long time (since 1.6 i think) and love it.

My supervisor had me install FreeBSD for a webserver so i got to
play with Free a little.

I have found some things i like about it and would like to see in
NetBSD. My point is not to start a flame that consumes time and
bandwidth, just to read your opinions and if some of the things
i suggest are good and people of the NetBSD team read my post,
maybe they get to NetBSD.

Now, what differences i saw:

1) The FreeBSD installer has more features and is newbie_friendly but
when not a newbie it takes much time. With NetBSD, i can have a base
system up and running in less than 2 minutes. Also, the FreeBSD has
some problems recognising the geometry of some of my disks.

2) I didn't like the fact that Free uses much gnu stuff (like ncurses)
in the base system

3) I liked Free's devfs. It makes /dev nice without hundreds of devices.
It would be nice if Net had something like that but i don't consider it
very important. It is a cosmetic feature.

4) Free comes with a default login.conf while Net doesn't have any

5) Free has a "update" target in the Makefile, which is rather nice.
Of course running "cvs -z3 update" is not hard either

6) The NetBSD build system is way better than that of Free. It prints
informative messages, and i can make a NetBSD installation cd from
linux or even from a windows system.

7) Free has a src.conf which can customize more features of the build,
than the variables in mk.conf . For example, i don't want to build the
games but in Net there is no MK_GAMES or something like that variable,
so instead of using build.sh i have to go in distrib/sets and manually
install with INSTALLSETS=3D.... (unless there is a way and i don't know
it)

8) Free has a "delete-old" target that deletes all old files which i
haven't found in Net. For example i always set MK_KERBEROS=3Dno in
mk.conf but when i compile the new base system and install it, of course
no kerberos files are installed but the old ones remain. Free finds this
and deletes the files. (again if there is a way and i don't know it
please tell me)

9) There are some minor problems with conf files when using some MK
variables. For example i build a -current installation cd without
kerberos files and went to install it in a server in work. The install
went fine, but when the system booted, i couldn't login because some
pam.d files had "pam_krb" and pam couldn't find it. The solution is
easy of course. I booted in single mode and hashed the entry, but
it would be nice, if the build system recognised the MK variable
and hashed the entry in the pam files.

10) Ports have more packages than pkgsrc, but pkgsrc has more updated
packages than ports (e.g ports-current have libdvdread-0.9.4 while 0.9.6
exists for a long time,also older libtool etc)

11) Pkgsrc lacks some packages which compile fine in NetBSD and exist
in -wip for a long time without anyone reporting problems.

12) Free has a "CPUTYPE" and "CFLAGS" variable which gets honoured in
all port, while i have found the "CFLAGS" mk.conf variable doesn't get
honoured in some pkgsrc packages.

13) X.org situation. I don't understand why the pkgsrc xorg doesn't want
to compile in /usr/X11R6 (besides the policy that all pkgsrc packages
must reside below LOCALBASE). Also, i don't know why there is a native
X while there is the pkgsrc one which works fine.


=46rom what i mentioned, primarily i would like to see 7), 8), 9)
These are minor problems of course, and most of the time i fix them
myself, but cvs update overwrites my changes or doesn't update the
files at all.

I would like to read your opinions about the things i mentioned.

I am sorry for my long post and thank you for your time.