David Brownlee <D.K.Brownlee@city.ac.uk>  wrote:
 > 	But I think there also needs to be a few more programs supplied
 > 	with the base release - some form of shell with command line
 > 	editing (such as tcsh or bash) would really help the immediate
 > 	perception of NetBSD. Other obvious additions might be perl,
 > 	top, screen, and a simple mail front end like pine.
 > 
 > 	Would it be possible for someone in the core team to comment as to
 > 	why this is a bad idea (to shut me up :), or if its likely to
 > 	happen?

I'm not a member of the core or anything but I think I'm beginning
to understand the various attitudes.

There are always many people who say "NetBSD would be better if it
only had xxx and yyy included in the base release" but the union
of the sets of "xxx and yyy"s is effectively an empty set.  You
want NetBSD to include Pine. Someone else wants Elm. Yet another
person wants MH. 

I think the whole point is that NetBSD is a freely available 
distribution of the technology present in 4.4BSD.  That's all. Sure,
there may be a few exceptions but generally, that's the flavour.

I believe that it is up to the people to do things like generate
packages and value-added distributions on CDROM and/or ftp sites.
NetBSD is just the OS.  The frills are the responsibility of the
people. If someone wanted to create "The penultimate NetBSD OS"
with X11R6, TeX, Gnu*, Perl, Pine, Elm, MH, etc, then I'm sure
it would be well received by people.  However, I don't believe it's
the responsibility of the core.

Just my couple of cents.