> I wish to remove packages that where initailly installed during installation of 
> the os.

they are not packages. there are eight packages: 
base, etc, misc, text , man, src, syssrc, and comp
and sometimes the X stuff. They are tarballs, and so you can easily find 
the lists of files in them and write a script to remove them. 

> 
> eg. I wish to remove sendmail m4 and several other packages and add my own 
> compiled version.
> 
> So how do I remove them. Do i have to manually delete each file. i gather there 
> must be a easier way.

just remove the m4 binary, the sendmail binary, the sendmail conf files, and
you're done with them. maybe six or seven files altogether. 

Isildur