Bind within src-contrib

Kevin Kinsey kdk at daleco.biz
Wed Oct 12 12:01:31 PDT 2005


This looks and sounds like a question, so I've changed the
cc: appropriately... if you reply, make sure and remove
"advocacy" in the event it appears....


Frank Laszlo wrote:

>
> Joshua Bell wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>>  I was attempting to build a minimal supfile, when I noticed that
>> bind was included within contrib.  This to me seems like something
>> that should be included within the ports tree, or atleast be included
>> in a portion of the tree with less crucial software.
>>

"Less crucial" being what, exactly --- the docs or manpages? Certainly
wouldn't move to games, now would it?  ;-)

>>  I personally do not see a reason for this, but please enlighten me on
>> why this is done.
>>
>> -Josh
>>  
>
>
> How would you like a system with no host(1), dig(1), or nslookup(1)? I
> personally consider these tools essential for a freebsd system.


Second that.  In my eXPerience, the lack of these tools on another
well-known OS is just reason++ not to use it if at all possible....

Now, I'm no "hat", nor even a committer, just a user of the OS, so
include standard disclaimer, etc., but my take is:

The "reason for this" is because we want FreeBSD to be able to
create a working server "out of the box".  So, we have ftpd, named,
Sendmail, all of the "small servers" running out of inetd... possibly
an interesting read would be the history of why there's no "stock"
httpd or dhcpd--- I would imagine that Apache's established reputation
had something to do with it in httpd's case, or maybe its portability
or outstanding flexibility, but can't even begin to really know anything
about that from personal experience.  I suppose it's notated in the
mail archives or the CVS repo somewhere....

And, *all* the stuff under src/contrib comes from "outside", so to speak.
So, none of it "belongs" in FreeBSD, per se.  But it's imported especially
for use in FreeBSD.  In that line of thought, I don't suppose we really
*need* bzip2, either --- we could always just use compress(1).  But,
if we remove BIND, needed to run a nameserver, shouldn't we take
out Sendmail, too, as it's needed to run a mailserver (Out of the box,
that is...).

Better yet, we could strip it down to just a kernel, and just let everyone
install their own tools, like from GNU, or wherever....

Wait!  That's already been done ... :D

HTH,

Kevin Kinsey


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