On 2008-12-31, at 14:18, Joshua Rodman wrote:
Firstly, the base OS install should be made of packages, or you've
bascially made the entire base OS install one package which fails to
support the features of other packages.
Um... what? The whole idea of abstraction that led to the use of
operating systems as opposed to standardizing on shared card decks
means that you don't have to change the base OS to support the
features of packages. That's what things like $PATH, and /usr/local/
etc/rc.d, and stuff like that are about.
Secondly, what use it to back up all the stuff relating to user-
selected
packages, if it might depend upon settings made in the base install?
Because the base install is stable, in a sense that even debian-stable
doesn't manage to emulate, while still allowing things like, oh, a
complete driver API change between FreeBSD 4.x and FreeBSD 5.x.
I realize that the idea that the system calls are supposed to be a
stable API, and the file system isn't supposed to change wildly every
minor release, and other, you know, basic design elements of BSD are,
like, completely crazy ideas to Linux people. But, really, this is a
non-problem.
