There are a lot of things that bothers one or another.
For example: Why is the hostname not set during the installation in sysinst ?
Now you can argue pro's and cons.
My experience is, if you want things to be changed in NetBSD you have
to fix it yourself and send in patches. If it makes sense it will be
committed.
Just hoping won't change anything.
If you aren't able to code, try to convice them in a discussion round
(->mailing list for example).

Greets, Zafer.

2006/8/27, Eye of the Beholder <eye.of.the.8eholder@gmail.com>:
> 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=.... (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=no 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.
>
>
> From 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.
>