I would like to ask the core team to IGNORE almost all requests for additions
to base distrib, until each has been made available as a pkgadd. Only if there
is compelling reason to have it bundled during the install phase should it
be on the base sets. 

Otherwise, please don't clutter the default release.

I too want perl and tk/tcl and emacs and and and, but I also want to keep
this thing simple. perl is about the ONLY one of these which maybe should
be there early on, but I am VERY skeptical even of this. 

If somebody wants perl to calculate disk address offsets, making sure the 
sums work for awk and/or bc and/or sh/expr would be very worth while. 

GUI? do it with shell level termcap tsend sequences. screen clear/address 
doesn't really take that much to do at shell level,  DEC managed it for SCAMP.

Post install, pkgadd is really the way to go.

-George