Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2003 21:41:06 +0200 From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Removing Sendmail Message-ID: <32260.1049312466@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Apr 2003 14:29:30 CDT." <XFMail.20030402142930.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
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In message <XFMail.20030402142930.jhb@FreeBSD.org>, John Baldwin writes: >I find an odd situation here whenever this topic comes up. One the >one hand, people are always wanting to split the entire base system >up into small packages for each little piece of the base. On the >other hand, one of FreeBSD's selling points in real-world environments >is that it doesn't have a bunch of little packages for the base system >like Linux distros. Do people really prefer something like having >rpm's for /bin/ps to having one lump base dist for all of /bin, /sbin, >etc.? I am, like any other geek, totally unable to resist anything with many controls, handles, levers and indicators. So of course I want total control of every aspect, inside my immediate grasp at the flick of simple switch. On the other hand, I have in the last 20 years found that after a few weeks I can seldomly remember how I had all the switches set last time, and therefore wasted precious time figuring it out (again). So all in all, Unless I run out of diskspace, I generally install the entire thing. The only place where I can see a sufficient benefit from being able to chop off stuff from the FreeBSD tree is in the embedded systems area, and for that having the controls in /etc/make.conf works fine for me. I think the only gadget I miss is a web-page somewhere with a set of buttons, one for each option, and a "calculate total size needed" submit button which tell me how many files, bytes etc the chosen configuration takes up on the specified FreeBSD version. Maybe this page could also contain an option to show the list of files, and maybe even a "backwards" option to tell which options are involved in a particular file or directorys existence. So, to answer you question: I like it as it is where I can disable stuff in /etc/make.conf, but I could used increased visibility into "what all them dang switches might do". -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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