Growing list of required(ish) ports

[Kevin Oberman]

On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 8:34 PM, Kimmo Paasiala <kpaasial at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 6:19 AM, Robert Simmons <rsimmons0 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:45 PM, Bryan Drewery <bdrewery at freebsd.org>
> wrote:
> >> On 4/7/2013 8:47 PM, Robert Simmons wrote:
> >>> Are there plans to get the following ports moved into HEAD?
> >>>
> >>> 1) ports-mgmt/pkg
> >>>
> >>> 2) ports-mgmt/dialog4ports
> >>>
> >>> 3) ports-mgmt/portaudit
> >>>
> >>> 4) ports-mgmt/portmaster
> >>>
> >>> It seems to me like these belong in the base system.
> >>
> >> On the contrary, the idea is that more and more should come *out of
> >> base* and into ports. Base is very static and stuck in time. By moving
> >> these things into ports, you are able to get updates much simpler. No
> >> need for an errata or security advisory or release. Just updating with
> >> portmaster/pkg upgrade.
> >
> > I understand where you're coming from, but perhaps there needs to be
> > movement in both directions.
> >
> > I may be way off the mark here, but I'd love to spark a discussion
> > about this.  I think that in general things that are directly FreeBSD
> > projects belong in base.  Examples would be pkgng, and making
> > dialog4ports a switch in dialog(1).  Essentially, code that does not
> > have an upstream should be in base.
> >
> > On the other hand, there are a number of things that I think should be
> > pulled out of base.  Some already have ports, and others would need
> > ports created.  Examples of things to pull out of base are OpenSSL,
> > Heimdal, OpenSSH, PF, ntpd, ipfilter, bind, sendmail, and others.
> > Code that is typically way behind the upstream project basically.
> >
> >>
> >> portaudit is not needed with pkg, just use 'pkg audit'.
> >
> > I had missed that.  Thanks!
> >
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Also, is there a reason why dialog4ports's functionality wasn't added
> >>> to dialog(1) as a switch?
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Regards,
> >> Bryan Drewery
> >> bdrewery at freenode/EFNet
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
>
> I think Bryan already explained the reasons why pkg should not be in
> base, it's an external tool that is not strictly required to get a bare
> bones FreeBSD system up and running. Including it in base you create
> yet another maintainance burden and would slow down the development of
> the ports/packages management tools.
>
> -Kimmo
>

What people seem to miss is that putting tools into the base system
strangles the tools. Look at the difficulty we have seen in updating
openssl. perl was removed from base for exactly that reason. Once something
is in base, it usually can only be updated  on major releases and even then
it can be very complicated. That is a problem for any dynamically changing
tool.

I would love to see BIND removed from base, but most of the things  you
listed really are hard to remove. I know that I don't want to try bringing
up a new install of FreeBSD on a remote system without OpenSSH and that
pulls in openssl.  In the case of many tools, it really turns into a
bikeshed. But i can see no reason to add any of the new packaging tools
simply because it is critical that updates be possible far  more often than
is possible for the base system.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com