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Date:      Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:17:42 -0700
From:      Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Ed Schouten <ed@80386.nl>
Cc:        arch@FreeBSD.org, current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: tmux(1) in base
Message-ID:  <4AB7ED76.5010406@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090921112657.GW95398@hoeg.nl>
References:  <20090921112657.GW95398@hoeg.nl>

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I hate to sound negative, but I really don't find arguments of the
sort, "the first thing I install on a new system is 'foo', so 'foo'
should be part of the base" compelling.[1] I, like a lot of other
FreeBSD users have never used screen or tmux, and probably never will.
For my money nohup works just fine for long-lived processes that need
a log. But even the "I don't use it so it shouldn't be there" argument
is not particularly persuasive.

We need to take a hard look at what kind of system we want to have.
It's a lot easier to keep userland utilities like tmux up to date from
the ports tree than it is in the base. That alone should be the
deciding factor, but if you want to hear a chorus of the "bloat"
argument then fill it in here.

Rather than going down the road of putting everything that some subset
of our developer base thinks makes a system "usable" into the base I
would like to suggest that the effort be spent on improving the
installation tools such that making a system "usable" out of the box
is a matter of ticking off a few boxes at install time. That change
will benefit a whole lot more users than installing one more userland
tool into the base.


Doug


[1] If we're going to go that route then I'm installing bash.
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