Re: Shipping SSL certificates in the base system

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 01:18:55AM +0000, maya%netbsd.org@localhost wrote:
> To reply to your points:
> 
> - Debian doesn't ship ifconfig because it considers it a legacy tool and
>   expects you to use 'ip'.

Yes, and they don't ship "netstat" because they expect you to use "ss",
and they don't ship (insert age-old standard Unix utility here) because
they grew up using MS-DOS and they still think feeling super cool for
not running MS-DOS trumps any kind of user convenience or technical
judgment.  But I digress!

> - We already have a package tool.

Indeed we do.  Reviving syspkg would let us integrate it better with
the basic set of stuff we ship in our base system.

>   Do you think pkg_* are doing poorly on file ownership? I don't intend
>   to port apt-get.

I think that the fact that we simply _don't_ get elementary things like
file ownership wrong leads me to trust our tools much more than theirs.

> - I assume the open coding of file ownership is because they provide a
>   working setup, whereas we expect users to configure things.

I'm not sure at all what this means.  To understand what a Debian package
does I have to implement a parser for a Turing-complete language (actually,
several, until they remove things like awk and sed from their default install);
to understand what our system sets do I need 'tar' and what our binary
packages do, approximately mtree.  I know where my bread is buttered.

> - Someone has been doing some recent stuff regarding syspkgs:
>   https://github.com/user340/basepkg

Good.

> I don't plan to do the work on making syspkgs, I just don't want to make
> things worse by adding a full but mostly incapable browser in base.

Captive-portal login is a very real problem.  How best to solve it otherwise?
Remember, small embedded systems (easily supported by adding additional sets
using our existing framework) are within scope.

-- 
  Thor Lancelot Simon	                                     tls%panix.com@localhost

  "We cannot usually in social life pursue a single value or a single moral
   aim, untroubled by the need to compromise with others."      - H.L.A. Hart