Chapman Flack wrote:

> I don't think a user of the system will be especially impressed by the
> philosophical purity of a separation, if the effect is a system that is
> harder to use and less well integrated. Any way you slice it, the two
> systems /are/ interdependent. They are interdependent for the inevitable
> reason that binary builds are not always available for the packages you
> need, in the versions and configurations you need, when you need them,
> so a source build fallback is necessary, and yet source-building everything
> may be prohibitively expensive, so it must be easy to have packages
> binary-installed when available in the right versions/options.  The
> philosophical decisions about how the parts of our system should or should
> not interact need to be judged by how well the resulting total system
> will perform under those inescapable demands.

Such a separation is not just philosophical. As soon as you have pkg_add
consulting the source, you lose the ability to bulk build on one
machine, and then install binary packages on many others without
installing the source. I would be very surprised if there aren't many
people out there doing just that right now.

-- 
Gillette - the best a man can forget