On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Lord Isildur wrote:

: BSD is its own thing. It is not just a linux distro. Get over it. 

NetBSD is its own thing.  It is not just a BSD distro.  Get over it.

What you haven't even considered, because you're talking without context, is:

- the base system will *still be* tarballs, and you will be able to extract
  them like any other tarball (you can even do this with binary pkgs);

- there is a real need for the ability to strip down the base system to fit
  into smaller media like those on flashcard based mips and i386 appliance
  boxes;

- there is a real need to be able to upgrade a base component in binary form
  with "binary patches" made available *between* releases;

- we will still be shipping unified, tested-to-our-satisfaction releases,
  and will not upgrade things like libc and the toolchain (barring security
  patches) between releases as Linux distributions frequently do.

Please stop this thread.  You're about 12 months too late to change the
outcome radically.  We went through all these points back then, and they
_have_ significantly shaped the direction that the base-package system will
follow.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@netbsd.org>