Re: Remove BIND, Sendmail, Perl and etc from base?

[Richard Coleman <richardcoleman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Pressey wrote:

> My argument would be something like:
>
> - The 'base' should be the set of packages required to build and run the
> OS, period.  If you want to do anything more than that, just bite the
> bullet and install more packages.
> - From a security standpoint, the fewer languages installed, the better;
> and from a correctness standpoint, the fewer of those that can send
> themselves into an infinite loop (i.e. Turing-complete,) the better.
> - You certainly don't need floating point variables and closures to
> install software and add users to the system.
> - Taking a powerful scripting language and crippling it would only
> result in a crippled scripting language.  We already have that - it's
> called 'sh'.
> - If you consider gcc+sh+make to be too cryptic and/or not flexible
> enough to develop in directly, use them as back-end languages: write
> Perlthonbycl scripts that write gcc/sh/make files, and include only
> those files in the 'base'.  They won't (directly) depend on the
> Perlthonbycl scripts, and won't require that the end user have
> Perlthonbycl installed on their system.
> - This approach avoids altogether the otherwise-inevitable religious war
> over which language to bless - thus alienating the fewest people.

We basically have an "embarrassment of riches" here.  There are so many 
good scripting languages, you can never get anyone to agree on which one 
to use.  So, we all end up with them all on our systems (cvsup needs 
Modula2/3, portupgrade needs ruby, lots of ports need Perl or Python). 
Disk space is cheap these days, so it doesn't really hurt anything.

Maybe the Linux guys have it right ... just use bash.  I doubt this 
would ever happen on the BSD system, but at least I understand a little 
better why several projects have settled on it.

Richard Coleman