Remove BIND, Sendmail, Perl and etc from base?

[Matthew Dillon]

:oh no ! please !
:
:a fine-grained packaging system used for the core OS is just a pain : I'm
:fed up with DeathTrap or Mandrake or Suse or .... with their thousands of
:rpm's 
:- how do you upgrade such a machine ? (with something intelligent like
:portupgrade ? but there are lots of oldish shared libs left behind)
:- how do you duplicate a machine ? (preferably with some automatic
:procedure) after living some time, it's very difficult to know the smallest
:set of base rpms you have to select to get the same install (with the other
:packages going in via dependencies)
:
:One big selling point of FreeBSD is the relative ease of configuration
:description : get the full OS, then add a smallish number of outside
:packages.
:
:        TfH

    heh.  There sayeth a man who's obviously been multiply bitten!

    Nothing is set in stone yet but I would say that I believe that we
    can do a far better job then those 'other' systems.

    What I want is a way to be able to specify a system like this:

    "I want cron, mozilla, and csh"

    e.g. at the highest level, to say that "I use these programs", and have
    the packaging system bring in as much as required to give me that.

    Ultimately we might even want to support something like this:

    "I want DragonFly_1_0_RELEASE and DragonFly_1_1_RELEASE and
    DragonFly_HEAD"... and have it bring in the complete base system for
    three different releases, and then be able to run in any of those
    environments (or all of those environments).

    An even more ultimate request might be:

    "I want a complete base system image for FreeBSD_4_8 *AND* I also want
    a complete base system image for DragonFly_HEAD."

    After all, if we are going to implement emulation layers that can run
    older releases we also need some way to install those releases!

    Ok, I may be biting off more then I can chew here, but you get the idea...

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>