Dominik Rothert <dr@astorit.com> writes:

> "Nathan J. Williams" <nathanw@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> 
> > >  If it ain't part of the base, it doesn't belong in /, /usr.  End Of
> > > Story.
> > "The base" is going to become less and less well defined. At some
> > point the installer will just install a bunch of packages, and "base"
> > is merely a list of package names. 
> 
> No, the base system is well-defined: it is NetBSD as-is (what the
> NetBSD team decides to be "essential"), and that does not imply
> large 3rd-party applications such as apache or whatever.

My point is that if "base" is just a list of packages, why should a
package's presence or absence on that list determine where it goes in
the filesystem? 

The list will change over time (witness racoon moving from pkgsrc to
basesrc); maintaining the metainformation of a program's current
stability status by its filesystem location doesn't serve a useful
purpose.

        - Nathan