On Sat, Nov 25, 2000 at 11:17:51AM -0500, Lord Isildur wrote:
> Does this sound like an acceptable idea? I 
> don't see whose concerns this fails to address. 
I think we basically give and take describe the same thing, so one vote 
from me.

> However, i am really against fragmentation of the standard distribution. 
> That's the whole point. 
I basically agree, but one or more tarballs wouldn't hurt, even if it
was just for the fact that some of the current tarballs are pretty
big (making them unhandy to deal with on tiny (old) systems.
But that's another issue.

(Net)BSD has always had the fine approach to provide users and
sysadmins with a powerful set of tools to assist you with what you
want to do. I haven't followed the discussion on the pkg-tization of
the base distribution, but I am fairly confident that that would be
the goal of this too. This as opposed to adding complexity to the
basic OS and system, and putting lots of machinery in between you and
the system preventing you from handling the system without the burden
of all that machinery, like much more common in the Linux and Windows
world. A good tool is in your own luggage if you find it useful to
carry around, but not part of the system's luggage.

I think many of us (including those working on the BSD pkg-tization)
have felt the pain of the pkg-ing strategies on other systems.
Some time ago, I needed to setup a server running Debian Linux. As
this server would probably get an ISDN backdoor for systemadmin, I
selected the ISDN ppp-package at installation time. The debian pkg system
concluded that if you want that, you probably also want a Web-proxy
installed and that's not very useful without a Web-browser, which
required X and gnome, which... It took me a very long day to find out
how to get rid of all that stuff again. Very educational, and I don't
think many if any in the NetBSD crowd wants to go there...

Feico.