On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Andrew van der Stock wrote:

> This packaging and total "dumbing" down stuff is boring me. It reads like an
> advocacy thread.

yes, because i and _many_ others advocate AGAINST this ridiculous talk of 
packagifying BSD!


> 1. I want packages that I can verify the authenticity of the distribution
> and of the files that are installed. Does tar do that? rpm, probably the

you get checksums of numerous flavors (MD5, BSD sum, etc) from the same 
place you get the distribution tarballs. 

> worst of the package "managers" does. When I lock down servers, rpm -q tells
> me what's installed on yer average Linux box. I'd like this to be extended
> to the base tarballs on NetBSD. What's so hard or wrong about doing this?

it's stupid _and_ unnecessary. That base tarball had a chacksum that 
verifies for you (within the error of a checksum, but i dont think too 
many people can knock MD5) that you got what the dist maintainers said 
was there. you want to know what's on the system? why, the Berkeley 
Distribution, of course! one single unified package, if you will. Want to 
check it against something? against WHAT? itself, i guess. well, then, 
do a find, write a line of shell to take an md5 of every file on the system,
and stash this somewhere. run it as a cron job every few days.  then any 
time some file changes, you know. heck, most BSD systems already have 
cron jobsin the standard crontabs that do half of this for you, and mail 
root the results nightly. the reason you need rpm -q on your average
linux box is because you have NO CLUE otherwise what's there. on a BSD 
system, you know EXACTLY what's there- there is one unified distribution. 

> I'd prefer it if the *bsd's had the same ports/packages collection and the
> same mechanisms for source and binary installation, but that's just me.

this is also stupid. you'd comfortable with the framgented, completely 
crappy and inferior non-system the linux world has because you're 
_familiar_ with it, and you want your familiarity wherever you go, i 
guess. im dont mean you in specific, but this is what 99% of this 'we 
want packages' rave is all about here. theyre used to it from the linux 
world, and they want their familiar faces in BSD too. We have a UNIFIED 
source tree. It is under centralised revision control. It is distributed 
in a UNIFIED distribution. The problems you encounter with the completely 
bogus linux 'collections' way of doing things _don't happen_ in the BSD
world. You want to upgrade a single thing? you download a patch, apply 
it to the sources, rebuild that one thing, and poof, update. The source 
controls it all, as it should be. If you don't like BSD, use linux, but 
don't clamor to make BSD into crap!

> 
> 2. I want databases to be started & stopped correctly so I don't lose any
> data and users' sessions cleanly disconnected. Does kill -<insert favorite
> signal here> do that? In most cases, with most Unix databases I've had the
> displeasure of looking after the answer is quite resoundingly "no".

you mean databases in what sense? these have nothing to do with the 
operating system. If youre talking aout postgres,mysql,informix,etc, 
those each have their own administration issues. this might be something 
behind why so many people hire database administrators, just an idea. 
databases are no more a part of the operating system than a word processor 
or an image viewer. I suppose you'd like all database vendors/makers to
standardize on their administrative techniques, too? 


> 
> 3. I want orthagonal administration of a wide variety of systems because I
> look after a wide variety of systems. Does NetBSD doing something just ever
> so slightly different help the enterprise system administrator? No. I'd

yes, everything should be EXACTLY THE SAME. Bow down to the ONE TRUE WAY. 
This sounds like you want a micro$oft system! go use their 'only one way 
to do it' systems! 

> prefer that we implement things better under the hood that operate exactly
> the same at a user level (think ls and it's 20+ switches that are fairly
> standard these days across even Linux and Solaris) FWIW, NetBSD's rc.d is
> implemented better than any of the Linux distro's in my opinion and I've run
> four of them in my time: slackware, redhat {4,5,6,7}, suse 6.3-7.0(++) and
> Caldera 1.3,2.2,2.3,2.4 and now the LTP.

You can cook up whatever you wish to do to make your personal preference 
in BSD comfortable with you. Please do not force that on us! I advocate 
keeping BSD as it is, as it has traditionally been, because i find BSD to 
be the vastly superior UNIX, for a multitude of reasons. I am _extremely_ 
sickened by people pressuring BSD to be like linux just because of 
popularity or market trends/whims! 

> 
> Get over it.
> 

BSD is its own thing. It is not just a linux distro. Get over it. 

> thanks,
> 
> Andrew van der Stock, ajv@greebo.net http://www.greebo.net
> SAGE-AU President	                   http://www.sage-au.org.au

Isildur