>	perception of NetBSD. Other obvious additions might be perl,
>	top, screen, and a simple mail front end like pine.
>	Would it be possible for someone in the core team to comment as to
>	why this is a bad idea (to shut me up :), or if its likely to
>	happen?

I am far from being in the core team :*), but I'll just say why I think
it might not be desirable (for me...):

  o The distribution archives are already pretty large, and the installation
    quite daunting as it stands.  I think rather than having things like
    perl etc. included in the distribution, a central binary/source archive
    would be more helpful.

  o A newly installed distribution takes some setting up as it stands, and
    a lot of the people trying will be new to *nix.  Things like perl in
    particular can be security holes waiting to happen if they aren't
    properly configured, and thats probably an unwanted burden on a new
    sysadmin.

  o Perl etc. isn't a part of the 4.4BSD release; now, I'm not saying this
    out of religous zeal ("We must go BSD... We must go BSD..." with glazed
    over eyes ;-), but one of the huge advantages of NetBSD over, say, Linux
    is that the new admin can go out and buy the standard 4.4BSD reference
    documents, and more-or-less everything applies.  This doesn't prevent
    adding on packages like perl really, but its worth bearing in mind before
    we go changing the standard shell, mail utility etc...

>		David

Just  IMHO of course - I can see lots of reasons why it might be a nice
idea too, but personally I'd prefer to be able to easily locate the individual
packages I want to add on, than have them thrown in (that gives me another
reason not to have the kitchen sink included in the standard distrib - hard
disk space).  Personally, I'd regard a central packages archive as a
nicer solution.  Speaking of which, can anyone point me at a TeX distribution
known to work? :*)


Cheerio, Tim.


-- 
 __ //||/  Tim Walls/TJay            EMail                 tjw1@doc.ic.ac.uk
 /_//=|/  Skating away...           PGP2.3 Key, finger  tjw1@sg1.cc.ic.ac.uk
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  `And with the last line almost drawn, wish you goodbye 'till further on'