On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 12:40:56AM +0300, Aleksey Cheusov wrote:
> IMHO NetBSD base system contains lots of rarely used things.
> It can be much smaller and some things can be easily moved to pkgsrc
> (even if they are developped and maintained in NetBSD CVS tree).
> I repeat my question I asked previously:
> is there *FORMAL CRITERIA* to include things into base system?
> - tools necessary for building whole system
> - tools necessary for setting up network
> - tools useful for developing NetBSD itself
> - at least one NetBSD developer wants it
> - POSIX/SUS/... require it
> - intuition ;-)
> - ?

Aleksey,

With a small change of build.sh options, I can cross-build every program
in the NetBSD base system for every architecture that NetBSD targets.
That is a useful guarantee that our base system provides.  If programs
in the base system, today, are only in pkgsrc, tomorrow, then I may lose
the guaranteed ability to quickly and easily cross-build a useful NetBSD
network appliance.  Does that help explain why I prefer a comprehensive
base system?

When speaking about programs that deserve to be in the base system,
something else to consider is that some software can be usefully run on
an embedded computer, or a 10 year-old computer, but I would quickly lose
patience waiting for that same software to build on the target computer.
Just for example, I run a lot more software on a Soekris net4526 embedded
computer than I would ever think to build on the net4526.  No, I prefer
to build software for the Soekris using my 2.4 GHz P4, or an even faster
computer.  Likewise, I would never build X11 on my 300 MHz UltraSparc 5,
but I would run X11 on that machine.  Gnome or KDE, on the other hand,
I would neiter compile nor run on any of my old/embedded and slow boxes.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933 ext 24