Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:43:48 +0200 From: Bernd Walter <ticso@cicely7.cicely.de> To: sthaug@nethelp.no Cc: dougb@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Interpreted language(s) in the base Message-ID: <20100816084348.GY99358@cicely7.cicely.de> In-Reply-To: <20100816.094740.74728369.sthaug@nethelp.no> References: <4C673898.2080609@FreeBSD.org> <AANLkTim_prShRiHkLnFbhek9%2Beaa-KaJ5oZtNo%2BLd0K1@mail.gmail.com> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008152240370.66595@qbhto.arg> <20100816.094740.74728369.sthaug@nethelp.no>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 09:47:40AM +0200, sthaug@nethelp.no wrote: > > Personally, I think the whole "base" and "ports" thing is an artificial > > divide that is rapidly losing utility. I think we're past due for > > stripping the FreeBSD "base" down to a much more bare minimum, and > > having a lot more of the bells and whistles live in the ports tree. > > Strongly disagree. One of the reasons I've been using FreeBSD for many > years is precisely the fact that the base system is very good, and > contains most of what I need without installing a lot of extra ports/ > packages. I can agree to this argument. While it is easy to install required tools on your system it is a hassle if you are doing support for systems installed by someone else. With FreeBSD you can expect a great set of tools already available. I remember the old days when I was doing embedded systems on tiny CF media and thought I only stripped the tools I really don't need, but in the end I often missed something. But I also never missed something with a complete base. Perl is a fancy tool, but when you really need it you don't have a problem in installing it. It is not that long time ago that a friend with his Linux couldn't even check the negotiated ethernet link without installing an additional tool - easy if you have network, but isn't this a tool to debug network problems? The last thing I've missed was something to script in single-user-mode. In loader we have FICL and in single-user-mode we have /bin/sh, while the shell is reasonable to write scripts it also requires external helpers which sits in non-mounted /usr - e.g.: grep, sed, lock, ... With todays disk and partition sizes however I don't split /usr - I split /usr/local (often don't even this), so this isn't a problem anymore. Having an embeddable lanmguage is another story - no matter if it is TCL, FICL, Lua or whatever. There is a possible benefit for extending our tools, but after reading PHKs history description I'm not that sure about it anymore. -- B.Walter <bernd@bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20100816084348.GY99358>