Is all this concern about space warranted?  I have the standard old
sets and x loaded into about 200meg.  (This is for an x86 platform.)
Most disks you buy these days are at least 2gig.  New pc's come with 6
to 10 Gig standard.  So from this point of view I really don't need to
know sizes of packages or meta packages or sets.  I really want the
whole thing.  So my question is which users are we optimizing for.
I also would like to think that all the "bits" will be available on
CDs or local servers, so optimizing for bandwidth is not that big
a deal either.

On the otherhand, I'm really interested in the new proposal because
I want to be able to reinstall an old package that I've broken, or a
newer version of the egcs package or do sane upgrades, ...

Also, anyone give thought to making the md5's a first class citizen of
packages so I can ask pkg_info to verify the installed base against
the official md5's in the package (ala FreeBSD mtree).