On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, Todd Vierling wrote:

> There are some things that a typical modern Unixlike OS usually has as
> OS-maintained components, and usually (but not always) because the
> components have little "outside" maintenance.  You have the Bourne shell
> (and C shell), the usual shell utilities, at least one mail agent, a
> compiler/development toolchain, a printing subsystem, IP-based utilities,
> and a manpage formatter.

  Right, but NetBSD does not actually maintain all of these things.  Just
because NetBSD does not maintain grep does not mean it does not belong in
the base system.  On the flip side, just because NetBSD maintains a
program does not necessarily mean that it should be installed by default.

  However, the fact that grep is not maintained by NetBSD does mean that
it should not be in the NetBSD CVS tree.  Instead, it should be referenced
in the ususal pkgsrc manner with patches.

> There have been pushes in the directions of both bigger and smaller base
> distributions (obviously I'm primarily in the latter group), and usually it
> comes down to a case-by-case "need vs. maintenance time" evaluation.  I had
> felt that CVS wasn't well evaluated in the maintenance time area.

  This is only a problem with the current scheme, not with packageized
source.

> >From most of the discussions like this, the end result is typically:  
> Pkg-izing something not in the list two paragraphs ago, that is well
> maintained by a third party, is mostly acceptable--*provided* that NetBSD
> offers a very simple and easy way to fetch the pkg-ized versions for
> installs or upgrades, and that a core set of pkgs (like cvs and lynx) is
> always built on all platforms alongside a release.
>
> Since we don't have these two very important prerequisites, it's hard to get
> anyone to agree on what should and shouldn't be in src.  My vent was more of
> a plea, in far fewer words, "please stop pulling more stuff into basesrc and
> work instead on making software granularity easier to live with."

  Yes, this is certainly necessary and relieves the "all or nothing" 
condition. However, it does not answer the basic question of what belongs
in the standard installation.


Matthew Orgass
darkstar@pgh.net