On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 12:03:18PM -0700, Rick Kelly wrote:
> Jason R Thorpe said:
> 
> >It enhances NetBSD because NetBSD will no longer have to ship *at least*
> >2 MTAs ... we currently ship 2 because one or the other doesn't fit everyone's
> >needs, and it so happens that people update to yet another MTA often anyway.
> 
> >Clearly the right thing is to push the problem out to pkgsrc.  I would
> >assert that the vast majority of NetBSD installations do not need to
> >accept mail from the outside world, they only need to be able to send
> >mail, usually through a centralized mail server on a network.  That
> >centralized mail server can get the full-blown MTA.
> 
> Email is a primary internet application. Not having it would detract from
> the usefulness of NetBSD. Downloading several hundred megabytes of pkgsrc
> just to build email is silly. And pkgsrc has a certain amount of problems
> when trying to use it to upgrade an application, disappearing software for
> one.

I have to say that yours is not the experience of most people.

And "several hundred megabytes" is a bit of an exaggeration:

% ls -al /pub/NetBSD-current/tar_files/pkgsrc.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r--  1 srcmastr  netbsd  14769103 Feb 15 03:32 /pub/NetBSD-current/tar_files/pkgsrc.tar.gz
%

As far as "disappearing software" goes, I'm not sure what you're referring to.
If it's some issue with "make update", let's try to help you out so that we
can fix it.

Regards,
Alistair