Experiences with FreeBSD 9.0-BETA2

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2011, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:

> Hi,
>
>>
> The storage world is not limited to spinning hardware. Take a 512MB
> CF, put it in a soekris box, and you got an embedded system capable of
> doing a whole bunch of stuff.
>
> Now, FreeBSD may no longer want to target such "niche" usage.

Sure we do!
See nanobsd.sh and 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/nanobsd/index.html

But the point is, if you are running an embedded system, it is almost 
certainly in your best interest to tune it a bit, to reduce 
disk/power/memory usage -- the default install should not feel too 
constrained by the limits of embedded systems.

>
>> If you have hardware of that nature, you are almost certainly going to want
>> to customize other aspects of the system (and if it's an under-provisioned
>> system, are you really going to be doing this customization in-place?), at
>> which point removing the extra stuff is minimal extra work.  If a developer
>> has to ask a user to do something (e.g. compile) in order to debug
>> something, there is a huge hit in the response rate; having the symbols
>> available in the general case can be helpful.
>>
> Then why don't you provide symbols for the whole system, including
> binaries and libraries ? At least be consistent in your argument...
>
> And, yes, I have patches for that.

Not really my argument; chance and POLA, really.
But that's not my call to make.  (Are the patches public/in a PR?)

-Ben