On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, der Mouse wrote:

[dM: > #2 is better for security reasons, according to some.
[dM:
[dM: And if any of the programs not installed are set-id (or otherwise
[dM: privileged), there are rational grounds for such a stance.

Sure, but I'll argue that they can be locked down without removing them.

[dM: Otherwise, the only problem I see with 1 is having tons o' stuff
[dM: sitting around occupying disk blocks and inodes even though it's never
[dM: used.

I'll take that "never used", myself, because the week I decide I "won't
be using it", invariably an unforeseen circumstance pops up in which
I need it.

Trust me on this.  Murphy *hates* me.

[dM: > I've heard it said that if you want a good UI design, go find a
[dM: > gamer.  They're not programmers, but in league with a programmer,
[dM: > they can help provide a good viewpoint for a design.
[dM:
[dM: Actually, there are a few gamers who are programmers.  I'm in awe when
[dM: I think of some of the games people managed to build in as little as 8
[dM: to 20 KB of ROM and maybe one or two KB of RAM.  I have ROM images from
[dM: one that just totally blows me away; someday I really want to dig
[dM: through them and really understand them....

I should have said, "by and large, they're not programmers."  There
is at least one exception to every rule...

[dM: > The trick is finding a gamer who knows how to use a CLI, as serial
[dM: > console installs are not likely to vanish anytime soon.
[dM:
[dM: (At least not for NetBSD!)  Well, do I count?  I've certainly wasted
[dM: enough time gameplaying, and I'm a firm believer that "menus belong in
[dM: restaurants".... :-)

Well, if you rip out menus completely, you're left with a manual
installation, which is not necessarily horrid to the cognoscenti among
us.  Indeed, it's how I've been doing them for years -- boot to single-
user via ramdisk, partition the disk, newfs the filesystems, mount them,
untar everything, install bootblocks, make devices, then reboot and fix
everything else.  4.2BSD did not have an install menu.

I don't think this is a be-all end-all solution, though, especially
not if we want to (pretend to) make any inroads onto the desktop or
into the server room (which, by the way, seems folly to me considering
that, by sheer market share, if M$ isn't kicking our butts, Linux is*).

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: *...but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop using NetBSD!