Re: Interpreted language(s) in the base

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 09:47:40AM +0200, sthaug_at_nethelp.no wrote:
> > Personally, I think the whole "base" and "ports" thing is an artificial 
> > divide that is rapidly losing utility. I think we're past due for 
> > stripping the FreeBSD "base" down to a much more bare minimum, and 
> > having a lot more of the bells and whistles live in the ports tree.
> 
> Strongly disagree. One of the reasons I've been using FreeBSD for many
> years is precisely the fact that the base system is very good, and
> contains most of what I need without installing a lot of extra ports/
> packages.

I can agree to this argument.
While it is easy to install required tools on your system it is a hassle
if you are doing support for systems installed by someone else.
With FreeBSD you can expect a great set of tools  already available.
I remember the old days when I was doing embedded systems on tiny CF
media and thought I only stripped the tools I really don't need, but in
the end I often missed something.
But I also never missed something with a complete base.
Perl is a fancy tool, but when you really need it you don't have a
problem in installing it.
It is not that long time ago that a friend with his Linux couldn't
even check the negotiated ethernet link without installing an additional
tool - easy if you have network, but isn't this a tool to debug network
problems?

The last thing I've missed was something to script in single-user-mode.
In loader we have FICL and in single-user-mode we have /bin/sh, while
the shell is reasonable to write scripts it also requires external
helpers which sits in non-mounted /usr - e.g.: grep, sed, lock, ...
With todays disk and partition sizes however I don't split /usr -
I split /usr/local (often don't even this), so this isn't a problem
anymore.

Having an embeddable lanmguage is another story - no matter if it is
TCL, FICL, Lua or whatever.
There is a possible benefit for extending our tools, but after reading
PHKs history description I'm not that sure about it anymore.

-- 
B.Walter <bernd_at_bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.