Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 16:37:52 +0200 From: Farid Hajji <farid.hajji@ob.kamp.net> To: jkh@zippy.cdrom.com Cc: jkh@freebsd.org, orders@cdrom.com, questions@freebsd.org, asami@freebsd.org, wosch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Missing distfiles on FreeBSD-4.0 RELEASE CD-ROMs Message-ID: <200005311437.e4VEbq002983@mail-ob.kamp.net> In-Reply-To: <10162.959761245@localhost> (jkh@zippy.cdrom.com) References: <10162.959761245@localhost>
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Hello Jordan, > > is there a way to persuade Walnut-Creek (a.k.a. BSDI) to include the > > distfiles on their next regular FreeBSD-4.X CDs? AFAIK, they were > It's not a question of persuading Walnut CreeK AKA BSDi, it's > a question of persuading me. I make the CDs. :-) I'm sorry that my critique was so harsh, but it seemed to me, that the decision to drop the distfiles was due to a company (BSDi) with commercial interests that may collide with the open source philosophy of FreeBSD, and I didn't know that this was actually "official" policy of -CORE. I just remember too well, how Sun dropped their C-Compiler from Solaris with the argument, that just a minority of users needed a compiler, and the hard time we had before there was a widely available port of GCC on that platform. The same scenario seemed to repeat itself with FreeBSD (CDs). I perfectly understand the space restrictions and I'm actually very impressed by the way, you managed to fit so many packages on just 4 CDs. But have you considered the following arguments? 1. Some packages are derived from GPLed sources and dropping their distfiles may not be in the spirit of the GPL. The GPL states, that it is enough to provide pointers to the sources, so that it is not necessary to include them physically on the distribution media, as long as they can be fetched off the 'Net or through other freely accessible channels. It is nonetheless sensible to provide at least the distfiles for GPLed packages (IMHO). 2. Most Linux-Distributions come with full sources or at least a substantial amount of sources, and that includes sources for everything, including what we know as packages. It can't be right, that those distributions are now much more open source compliant than FreeBSD-RELEASE! I'm actually fetching some of the missing "distfiles" from a Linux-CD and I can imagine how many other FreeBSD users are doing the same. It's a shame that we're getting dependant on Linux distributions to get at the sources. Referring to the Toolkit is okay, but the fact that it is now necessary to buy it in addition to or instead of the offical FreeBSD CDs has to get much more publicity. 3. It is certainly difficult to find space for gzipped distfiles that are on the average bigger than gzipped binaries. A small amount of space may be saved by bzip2-ing them instead but that only delays the space problem somewhat. More substantial savings could be probably achieved by considering the fact that many internationalized packages (like ja-*, ko-*, ...) derive from common sources. A set of patches (a.k.a. a port) may have been very economical in such cases (?). 4. I can't imagine that every package is equally popular. They are certainly many less required packages that could have been delivered as distfiles instead of precompiled binaries. The overhead of compiling them may be acceptable to concerned users. To make things go as smoothly as possible, sysinstall could be expanded in such a way, that missing binaries could be automacially compiled from the distfiles, thus making the installation of ports as transparent to normal users as possible, retaining the open source philosophy, at the cost of slightly increased installation time. 5. I agree with you, that sources of 3rd party packages are only needed by a minority of users. However, many users that are actually developing or enhancing/modifying software would not have done so without the sources being _easily_ available_. Even some users, that were not primarily interested in sources, were curious enough and had a look, just to find out, that they could too contribute to the free software community. This is the way Linux works and we're giving too much potential away, by deciding to put the sources on a separate CD-Set like the Toolkit (which is by the way excellent!). Is it really worth leaving the sources out of the main distribution, just to speed-up the installation as much as possible and to include a few more "exotic" binaries? I sincerely hope that there will be a way to get most distfiles back on the regular FreeBSD CDs someday. In the meantime, we should make it very clear to every user that the Toolkit _is_ actually needed and that it should be considered integral part of FreeBSD (-RELEASE & -SNAP). Thank you very much. -- Farid Hajji Broicherdorfstr. 83, D-41564 Kaarst, Germany Phone: +49-2131-67-555, E-Mail: farid.hajji@ob.kamp.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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