On Sun, 30 Sep 2001, Tomasz Luchowski wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 02:12:29PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> >
> > Me too.  The idea that we can't _ever_ remove software from the NetBSD
> > base distribution is one of the principal factors encouraging the recent
> > and horrific bloat of NetBSD.  The amount of disk required for a minimal
> > (base+etc) distribution has _doubled_ since 1.4.
>
> I agree with you. As I don't use UUCP, I'd like to see it moved to pkgsrc,
> so I won't fill my disk with software I'm never going to use,
> and people who use UUCP will have easy way to install it.

... but no easy way to maintain it. A source tarball, plus NetBSD
patch-tarball plus miscellaneous patches is really ugly and difficult
to maintain. Consider, our cross-compiler packages, which use that,
are still stuck at NetBSD-1.3 level.

Base packages with top-level make targets would mean: (1) _you_ don't
have to build or install it, therefore (2) you don't even have to
check out the source. Moreover, (3) no-one has to install the binary
package if they don't want to, but (4) NetBSD retains the commitment
to maintain it (for NetBSD).

Frederick