Nick Holland wrote:
I think you were confusing UPGRADE and UPDATE there someplace.
No, I updated 3.9-release to 3.9-stable.
Remove (or don't install) Sendmail... Boom, your daily reports are now non-functional. There are other ways you could get the same info, but none of them quite as simple or built-in. Remove Perl, suddenly, the package tools would stop working (and that would be unfortunate when you wished to reinstall Perl). The developers have assumed certain things are in the basic installation. Verifying the dependencies for every combination of "core packages" would be difficult...and pointless.
Well I think that's feasible, it the package manager manages dependencies and the dependencies in the packages are correct.
Plus, the whole thing would look like a number of Linux distributions, which think nothing of requiring some of six CDs for a "basic" install, installing five different screen editors, but think that locate(1) and sudo(8) are "options" (and lots of the stuff is broken, because there is just too much stuff to test). The developers have picked a set of apps they feel makes a system highly useful, and yet keep the system very lean. We can be pretty sure that unless you do something strange, your base system looks a lot like my base system. The "base" system can still be installed with ease on a 250M flash device or a very old hard disk, which is leaner than most of the more "modular" systems end up being.
That's true, but by actually using packages, following -stable could be done by updating small packages and it would perhaps make binary updates easier because only parts of the OS would have to be updated.
-pu
