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Date:      Sun, 13 Jan 2002 23:56:26 +0200 (EET)
From:      Giorgos Verigakis <verigak@algol.vtrip-ltd.com>
To:        Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
Cc:        Zvezdan Petkovic <zvezdan@CS.WM.EDU>, <stable@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Portupgrade Utility
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.30.0201132335360.16973-100000@algol.vtrip-ltd.com>
In-Reply-To: <p05101207b867a58a0f6d@[128.113.24.47]>

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On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Garance A Drosihn wrote:

> At 10:42 PM +0200 1/13/02, Giorgos Verigakis wrote:
> >On Sat, 12 Jan 2002, Zvezdan Petkovic wrote:
> >  > Allow me to disagree. CVS is absolutely necessary. CVSup is not. It's
> >>  merely a convenience. One can do source and port updates using cvs only.
> >
> >So you say that an OS should not provide conveniences to it's users?
> >If you look at /usr/bin there are a lot of tools that are merely a
> >convenience. How many times have you used apply, biff, col, grog or
> >jot?  (I just picked 5)
>
> The *base* OS has to draw a line somewhere, particularly a base OS which
> is sometimes installed on systems which are low in resources.  The fact
> that the *base* OS includes some trivial and probably little-used
> utilities is more of a historical legacy.  It is not a green light to
> include every single package which "provides convenience to" some
> subset of the users of that OS.

I didn't say that. I thought the discusion was about this line.


>
> That is what the ports collection is for -- adding those conveniences.
> One man's convenience is another man's "waste of disk space" (or time,
> or some other resource).  Consider someone who administers a large
> number of machines.  Only *one* of those machines "needs" cvsup.  All
> the other machines could easily get their files via NFS-mounting the
> relevant directories from the first machine.

True. If the only thing I run is a web server (a pretty common case) I
would delete most of the files in /usr, /etc, /var, etc. Good thing that
disks are so cheap nowadays ;)


>
> Certainly CVSUP is very convenient, but there are other criteria to
> consider when putting things into the *base* operating system.
>
> I do think that maybe things like cvsup or portupgrade should be
> automatically installed if the user asks for "the source tree" or "the
> ports collection" when they are installing the OS, but those programs
> should still be handled as separate packages and not as part of
> "the base OS".

That's an idea but anyway I was speaking generally. On the other hand
I don't think this is the correct list for such a discussion...


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