On 30 Dec 2000, Nathan J. Williams wrote:

Perhaps one of the issues of "base" vs. "packages" is that "base" means
written for NetBSD along, while "package" can mean "third party". That is
an important distinction, even if the base becomes a set of packages
anyway, regarding FS layouts...

> [One of the things that really annoys me about NetBSD these days is a
> proliferation of trivial options, particularly in the build system
> (things like the sendmail/postfix flags, NOFOO for many values of FOO,
> etc). Dividing the universe into packages is a much saner way of
> handling a lot of this mess.]

Yes. I don't see why XFree86, sendmail, postfix, and indeed most stuff has
to be in the "base". I'd much rather they were in pkgsrc.

Things I'd move into pkgsrc:

BIND
sendmail
postfix
X
Everything from gnusrc (if you want gcc for compiling from pkgsrc, pull
down a precompiled binary)
The games
bzip2... in fact, most stuff from under /usr
inetd and friends

Why? So people can strip systems down better, and upgrade things more
easily.

I would define the "NetBSD base" as the kernel and the associated
NetBSD-specific tools. The rest can be seperated out so that people from
other OSes can in theory port our IPv6 inetd to their platform, if they
want to.

Controversial? :-)

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software