Jonathan Stone said:
> The consenus then was that it's important to be able to get the entire
> "base OS" distribution as a reasonable number of files. There are
> several good reasons for this, not least for people who are trying to
> pull install materials off the net, and pre-laod them to local media
> before installing (e.g., an ms-dos partition) or to load them before
> going to a remote site (or to help a friend install).

Fair enough.

But there will also be people who want some but not all of the pkgs in a
pkg-set, and who do not want to waste the network bandwidth or disk space
to fetch the entire pkg-set. 

Could we keep both groups of people happy somehow?  Perhaps by having
mutant pkg-sets that contains pointers to its constituent pkgs instead of
containing copies of them, and letting people choose whether to use the
plain pkg-sets (containing copies of the pkgs) or the mutants (containing
pointers to the pkgs). 

These mutant pkg-sets seem to look a lot like meta-pkgs, and I can imagine
a new kind of meta-pkg that does everything the existing meta-pkgs do, and
everything the proposed pkg-sets do, and allows the people who build the
pkg to choose whether to use copies of or pointers to the constituent
pkgs.

--apb (Alan Barrett)