Re: Adding software to base

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 10:32:29AM +0100, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
 > > By these criteria, from my point of view, if we were considering adding
 > > each today, tmux would clearly come in, while the huge gonkulating beasts
 > > that are Taylor UUCP or sendmail would be out -- the former on criteria
 > > #1 and #3, the latter on criteria #2 and #3.
 > 
 > Both *are* out.

Yes, but at one point they were put in, which was not a mistake but a
reflection of an additional criterion:

(4) There should be some clear advantage to or reason for having the
software in base rather than installed separately.

In the case of sendmail, the reason was that mail handling is a system
service and the mail handling software had to be integrated into the
system to work properly. (This is still the case; we just replaced
sendmail with postfix.) This also explains uucp, because back then
the interaction between sendmail and uucp was delicate, plus uucp was
more or less required for mail in a large fraction of environments.
Neither of these things is true any more, and we got rid of uucp.

I don't see any particular systems integration reason to have tmux in
base. (Or window(1) either.) The reasons offered so far mostly seem to
boil down to "pkgsrc is a pain", which should be fixed in pkgsrc.
Otherwise we might as well import everything in pkgsrc (that's widely
used) into base, and that's clearly stupid.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost