On Sat, Dec 30, 2000 at 05:56:00PM -0500, Nathan J. Williams wrote:
> 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
> > > "The base" is going to become less and less well defined. At some
> > No, the base system is well-defined: it is NetBSD as-is (what the
> 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? 

Well, even if the base system becomes 'pkgized, it's still 'the base
system' - that means things can depend on those programs being
available. Things that may need to use them at boot time, for example.

Pkging the base system is not neccesarily for the purpose of letting
people not install parts, but rather to try to make certain imcremental
upgrades easier.

> 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.

I don't know about racoon in particular, but things like that are 
more likely to move for reasons other than stability. Racoon is
needed to do PKI, as part of IPV6, that makes it pretty 'base'ful.

I _love_ pointing out to Linux people the lack of dependence on
shared libs in /bin and /sbin - it's such a simple concept, but
very useful at times.

Keep in mind the various reasons for keeping things seperate...
partition space, recoverability, organization, security, convienience,
flexibility, and probably a dozen I haven't thought of.

In short - $PATH exists for a reason - enjoy it ;-)

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
If you don't spend energy getting what you want,
	You'll have to spend it dealing with what you get.
					      - Unknown