Re: CVS removal from the base

> > The fact that we have so many people who are radically change-averse, no
> > matter how rational the change; is a bug, not a feature.
> >
> > This particular bug is complicated dramatically by the fact that the
> > majority view seems to lean heavily towards "If I use it, it must be the
> > default and/or in the base" rather than seeing ports as part of the
> > overall operating SYSTEM.

I don't think of myself as change-averse. I've been using FreeBSD 
since 1996, and there have been lots of changes since that time. But
two of the most important reasons I still use FreeBSD are:

- Stability: Both in the sense of "stays up basically forever", and in
the sense of "changes to interfaces and commands are carefully thought
through and not applied indiscriminately". For instance, I like very
much the fact that the ifconfig command can configure VLANs etc - while
Linux has introduced new commands to do this.

- The base system is a *system* and comes with most of what I need, for
instance tcpdump and BIND. For me the fact that I don't need to install
lots of packages to have a usable system is a *good* thing.

> You are right in general, except one small factor. We are talking about 
> bootstrap.
> CVS is used by many as the one of the ways to get the sources to the freshly
> installed system to recompile to the last available source. It will 
> become inconvenient
> to do it through the process of installing some ports for that. 
> Especially if corresponding
> ports would require some other ports as dependences.

I use CVS (or rather csup) to keep the base system up to date. I would
be perfectly okay with using a different utility - however, I would 
strongly prefer that this utility was included in the base system.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug_at_nethelp.no