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To: David Nugent <davidn@unique.usn.blaze.net.au>
cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: ports-current/packages-current discontinued 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 03 Aug 1997 07:40:47 +1000."
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Date: Sat, 02 Aug 1997 17:06:07 -0700
Message-ID: <17040.870566767@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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[Trimmed to -current - PLEASE watch those cc lines, folks!  We're all
 getting unforgivably sloppy here]

> What features in tcl8.0 are required for a running FreeBSD system?
> Why is it essential that tcl be present in the base system AT ALL?
> What benefits are there in tcl being present here instead of being
> built by the ports/packages system?

OK, these are all good questions.  I will attempt to answer some
of them.

1. TCL needs, *at some point* (and note that the current move was
   rather premature, but let's not debate that here) to be part of
   the base system so that the installation tools can use it.
   We do intend on being heavy users of TCL, if not right this minute
   then in the future.

2. If it were in ports, we'd have a build problem since you wouldn't
   be able to build /usr/src/usr.sbin/setup (not existant yet, but
   it will be) without first building and installing a port.  This
   would break the world target.

Now the obvious "answer" is to somehow integrate ports with things
that depend on it in /usr/src (I'm assuming that we'd also bite the
bullet with perl and that things like adduser would also have this
problem), but the question is how?  Where do the distfiles live?  How
does the world target jump from src to ports in building a "complete"
system with all the trimmings?  How does this effect how we distribute
ports and on which CD(s) the various files live?  Most people only
have one drive, and if you're going to support building srcs off CD
(a definite goal) then what does that entail in the brave new world
of merged ports and src?

Those are the questions which *must* be answered, and answered well,
before we can start truly pushing things out of /usr/src and
exclusively into the ports collection.  Elitist solutions which
require dedicated network access or more than a jellybean 486 (of
which we still have many in our userbase) need not apply.

					Jordan