From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Oct 13 10: 4:18 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from jacuzzi.local.mindstep.com (modemcable156.106-200-24.mtl.mc.videotron.net [24.200.106.156]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id C7A2C14F5B for ; Wed, 13 Oct 1999 10:04:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from patrick@mindstep.com) Received: (qmail 3284 invoked from network); 13 Oct 1999 17:04:11 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO patrak) (192.168.10.25) by jacuzzi.local.mindstep.com with SMTP; 13 Oct 1999 17:04:11 -0000 Message-ID: <011801bf159c$f80630e0$190aa8c0@local.mindstep.com> From: "Patrick Bihan-Faou" To: "Pierre Beyssac" , "David G Andersen" Cc: , References: <199910131428.KAA11701@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <199910131436.IAA02185@faith.cs.utah.edu> <00a801bf158d$421afc20$190aa8c0@local.mindstep.com> <19991013183345.A24019@enst.fr> Subject: Re: package-like feature for the base distrib (was Re: FreeSSH) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 13:04:10 -0400 Organization: MindStep Corporation MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, From: Pierre Beyssac > There are a _lot_ of pitfalls to this kind of approach, as I have > discovered using Linux Debian. This would probably open a can of > worms you have no idea of. IMHO, the single biggest mistake in > Debian is the all-encompassing package system which can make your > life miserable in no time. [...] I was not talking about things that constitute the "real" core of the distribution (kernel, basic libraries etc.). I was more thinking about "userland" stuff that is included in the distribution but might not be required by everybody. Sendmail for example is something I don't want since I user qmail. However I have to remove it by hand... Other examples are bind or perl. Basically I think anything that has an equivalent and/or an alternate installation method in/via the "ports" system should be registered with the rest of the packages. > And, IMHO, package handling for general-purpose applications and > package handling for the core system are a very different problem > and should be handled in very different ways. Agreed. This is the key. The package/ports system is really great as is. The split between the distribution and the packages/ports is sometime annoying. Again I think this mostly concerns "userland" features that are not required for the core of FreeBSD. Patrick. -- MindStep Corporation www.mindstep.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message