RFC: Removing file(1)+libmagic(3) from the base system

[Colin Percival]

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 12:10:35AM -0700, Colin Percival wrote:
>> Interestingly, my experience from portsnap is that people tend to update
>> ports more frequently than they apply security patches to the base system.
> 
> ...with freebsd update.  Important qualification.

No, I was looking at version numbers reported by portsnap: Over half of the
systems running FreeBSD 6.0 or FreeBSD 6.1 are still running the RELEASE with
no security patches (or no kernel patches, at least), while systems running
old versions of portsnap were upgraded to newer versions of portsnap far more
quickly.

Admittedly, there is a bias here in that people running portsnap are likely
to be more interested in updating their installed ports than most FreeBSD
users; but I still think it's a significant difference.

Colin Percival