From owner-freebsd-arch Fri Sep 15 15: 3:30 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from winston.osd.bsdi.com (winston.osd.bsdi.com [204.216.27.229]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8C31737B422 for ; Fri, 15 Sep 2000 15:03:27 -0700 (PDT) Received: from winston.osd.bsdi.com (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by winston.osd.bsdi.com (8.11.0/8.9.3) with ESMTP id e8FM3F697980; Fri, 15 Sep 2000 15:03:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com) To: Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group Cc: Wilko Bulte , Will Andrews , arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Packages (was: Re: Rsh/Rlogin/Rcmd & friends) In-Reply-To: Message from Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group of "Fri, 15 Sep 2000 14:25:31 PDT." <200009152125.e8FLPmt26231@cwsys.cwsent.com> Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 15:03:15 -0700 Message-ID: <97976.969055395@winston.osd.bsdi.com> From: Jordan Hubbard Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > Which is, IMHO, not having to select 10^6 different items during > > sysinstall. That would smell like Linux, right? > > What would be wrong with that? Solaris is installed via packages. So > are the most widely distributed mainframe operating systems (MVS, VM, > and VSE). AIX installs everything using packages. The fact that > RedHat has adopted this approach, which has been used for years before I think people are drawing a false association between "organization" and "packaging", two things which are currently linked together in FreeBSD for historical rather than practical reasons. Let's take FreeBSD's bindist for example. It started life as a simple sweeping together of everything in "/etc, {/usr,}{/bin,/sbin}" and that was that. Then people griped that they wanted to not have to install catpages, so those got scooped out into another tarball before the bindist packaging phase got run and now the contents of the aformetioned directories were magically smaller. Then we did the same with the proflibs, then the manpages (I may have the ordering wrong here, sue me), etc etc. The eventual result was that you had a "flat but occasionally deep" set of distributions like: bin proflibs manpages catpages ports ... Where some things like "bin" were still very big and not further sub-divided at all (still contained docs tools, compilers, etc) and other things, by collective whim, were removed and shoved up to the same level in the hierarchy. What people wanted but didn't actually get was something more like: [X] bin [X] base [ ] proflibs [ ] manpages [ ] catpages [ ] ports ... And what they'd *really* like is something more like: [X] bin [X] base [X] compiler tools [X] perl language [X] documentation formatters [X] printing [ ] proflibs [ ] manpages [ ] catpages ... [ ] ports ... Which actually subdivides bin into all the logical pieces which comprise it. You'll notice that I also checked some of the items by default, something which I think it's up to the *installer* to do ahead of time in response to an earlier "user profile" question. There's no reason why, if the user selects "Standard", that they shouldn't get a default set of packages selected which results in the *exact same* FreeBSD footprint which we all(*) know and love(**) today. Similarly, if the user knows exactly what they're doing and they really really hate Perl (just to pick a completely arbitrary and unbiased example), they can de-select that or simply pick "Custom" instead of "Standard" in the first place. If these things are also furthermore packages, then one of us admin types can come along later during the process of trying to debug this person's systems and use pkg_info (or whatever follows it) to get an immediate report of what's installed and go "aha, you didn't install the compiler tools, no wonder your kernel builds are falling over." - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message