Remove BIND, Sendmail, Perl and etc from base?

[Peter da Silva]

Chris Pressey wrote:
Well - if it's not in the base system, then it's ... um ... a package :)
Have a self-unpacking package model. All you need in base is a
command to unzip a simple tarball and run an install script.
This command can then be overlaid with a more complete mechanism
that can handle more sophisticated packages, streaming packages,
multi-part packages, DEBs, RPMS, what have you.
If you go to a different format than tarballs, though, PLEASE make
it something that's clearly decomposable using nothing more than
you can expect in a basic UNIX box.
If you want a streaming thingy, start it with a block that contains:

#!/bin/sh

[ ! -r "$0" ] && {
  echo "You must execute this with the full file name, not just $0"
  exit 2
}
dd if="$0" bs=1k skip=1 | unpack_command

exit

however many blanks are needed to pad it to 1k

I don't have much against 'make' (I have more objections with the *way*
it's used, than the tool itself.)
Yah, something that builds a makefile from a declarative text file
and then runs it, if you need a makefile at all, would be better.
And it shouldn't need more than shell scripts to do the job, either.