Re: Removing Sendmail

In message <XFMail.20030402142930.jhb_at_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_at_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.