Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 16:12:29 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Giorgos Verigakis <verigak@algol.vtrip-ltd.com>, Zvezdan Petkovic <zvezdan@CS.WM.EDU> Cc: <stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Portupgrade Utility Message-ID: <p05101207b867a58a0f6d@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.30.0201132228590.16778-100000@algol.vtrip-ltd.com> References: <Pine.LNX.4.30.0201132228590.16778-100000@algol.vtrip-ltd.com>
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At 10:42 PM +0200 1/13/02, Giorgos Verigakis wrote: >On Sat, 12 Jan 2002, Zvezdan Petkovic wrote: > > Allow me to disagree. CVS is absolutely necessary. CVSup is not. It's >> merely a convenience. One can do source and port updates using cvs only. > >So you say that an OS should not provide conveniences to it's users? >If you look at /usr/bin there are a lot of tools that are merely a >convenience. How many times have you used apply, biff, col, grog or >jot? (I just picked 5) The *base* OS has to draw a line somewhere, particularly a base OS which is sometimes installed on systems which are low in resources. The fact that the *base* OS includes some trivial and probably little-used utilities is more of a historical legacy. It is not a green light to include every single package which "provides convenience to" some subset of the users of that OS. That is what the ports collection is for -- adding those conveniences. One man's convenience is another man's "waste of disk space" (or time, or some other resource). Consider someone who administers a large number of machines. Only *one* of those machines "needs" cvsup. All the other machines could easily get their files via NFS-mounting the relevant directories from the first machine. Certainly CVSUP is very convenient, but there are other criteria to consider when putting things into the *base* operating system. I do think that maybe things like cvsup or portupgrade should be automatically installed if the user asks for "the source tree" or "the ports collection" when they are installing the OS, but those programs should still be handled as separate packages and not as part of "the base OS". -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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