Subject: Re: Third party source [was re: airport codes.]
To: Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>
From: Matthew Orgass <darkstar@pgh.net>
List: tech-misc
Date: 10/19/2000 18:38:10
On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Todd Vierling wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Hubert Feyrer wrote:
> : > lynx should *never* become part of NetBSD.
> : , because ....... < please fill this space. 
> 
> <VENT>
> The same reason CVS SHOULD NOT BE PART OF THE BASE DISTRIBUTION:
> 
> It's maintained by a third party, and we don't have significant local hacks
> that have no other maintainer, so it is easier to maintain by keeping it in
> pkgsrc.
> </VENT>

  I don't think that this is a good standard of inclusion, though
hopefully it will not be long before the base system is packageized and
"what"  becomes separate from "how".  Some things, like grep, are not
maintained by NetBSD but obviously belong in the base system, and others
are maintained by NetBSD but probably do not belong in the base system
(uucp?, telnetd?).  I believe that othersrc is already used for a few
NetBSD-maintained-but-not-in-the-base-system programs. 

  I do think that NetBSD as a project should define a policy for
inclusion, preferably by public discussion then a final decision by core.

  One thing I like about NetBSD is that it is not exceptionally bloated
and does not contain things like apache.  In fact, I would argue that most
servers and many clients that are currently in NetBSD should not be. 
However, I do think that NetBSD should include at lest a simple web
browser because HTML is an extremely common document format that just
about everyone will need to use as some point.  Such a browser would
ideally provide basic access to the content of web pages for both humans
and scripts and share transport code with ftp.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@pgh.net