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Date:      Sun, 31 Aug 2003 09:30:47 +0200
From:      Andreas Klemm <andreas@freebsd.org>
To:        Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk>
Cc:        chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: strip FreeBSD a bit
Message-ID:  <20030831073046.GA76521@titan.klemm.apsfilter.org>
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.1.20030830235954.02dd9620@popserver.sfu.ca>
References:  <3F5193E2.8060805@carebears.mine.nu> <3F50C956.70603@carebears.mine.nu> <20030830151544.G21642@znfgre.qbhto.arg> <3F5193E2.8060805@carebears.mine.nu> <5.0.2.1.1.20030830235954.02dd9620@popserver.sfu.ca>

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On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 12:09:47AM -0700, Colin Percival wrote:
> At 08:50 31/08/2003 +0200, Andreas Klemm wrote:
> >IMHO I think its a good thing that a normal FreeBSD installation
> >includes bind and sendmail. This makes FreeBSD a complete
> >(standard/traditional) Unix after basic installation.
> 
>   I disagree.  There's lots of important stuff in the ports tree -- cvsup, 
> portupgrade, various languages -- which are pretty basic elements of 
> FreeBSD these days.  No sane person is going to be running just the base 
> FreeBSD system except in very unusual circumstances.

cvsup needs modula to compile. You would have to add modula 3 into
the FreeBSD build environment, thats one big reason why you won't
see cvsup in FreeBSDs base system.

Portupgrade relies on ruby. Same issue here. These are the things
that the FreeBSD developers dislike, a bloated FreeBSD with tools
that need a bunch of other tools as a prerequisite.

rewrite cvsup and portupgrade in C or C++, then I think these tools
could go in. Like mergemaster, which was at the beginning also a port
but has been migrated into base system when the two following two
things has been met:
	a) stable enough
	b) has a maintainer in the base system who takes care of it
	   in all active release branches

>   The ports tree may have once been a set of FreeBSD ports of software 
> written for other operating systems, but it is now useful primarily as a 
> packaging system.  Ideally, things like sendmail and bind would be taken 
> out of the base system, and sysinstall would offer people the option of 
> installing sendmail/qmail/exim/portfix/nothing and bind/djbdns/nothing; for 
> that matter, most things under contrib/ are probably good candidates for 
> removing from base.

I disagree here. sendmail and bind have a long tradition in the
FreeBSD base system. So everybody expect them there.

You would have to write wrappers for all those tools, sendmail
and bind, so that they appear to be in the base system paths ...
/usr/bin, /usr/sbin etc ....

I would dislike seeing sendmail and bind commands somewhere under
/usr/local.

Another thing is, that tools that live under /usr/src IMHO
are naturally better integrated into the base system and are
better tested and reviewed than tools that live under /usr/local !
FreeBSD developer who have commit rights under /usr/src certainly
take better care of what comes into /usr/src and what not !

Ports sometimes get updated a bit "sloppy". Therefore I prefer
a well tested sendmail and bind in the base system, that getting
all this bits from ports.

	Andreas ///

-- 
Andreas Klemm - Powered by FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE
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