[rescue] Happy New Year! RIP, Sun/Solaris...

[Jonathan J. M. Katz]

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 2:22 PM, Phil Stracchino <alaric at metrocast.net> wrote:
> Frankly, the entire *BSD userspace is a bit on the primitive side.  What
> I don't understand about this is that the true *BSD zealots (of which
> there fortunately seem to be none on the list that I am aware of) appear
> to regard it as a point of pride.
>
> "Diff, patch, and vi are effete.  When I were a lad, we patched our
> kernel code with ed, and we LIKED it!"

This is going to dissolve quickly, but frankly I like a primitive
userspace. With less stuff, there is less stuff to break, and the
system will only have the components you want.

For instance, I need to do smaller installs of CentOS for VMs for
work. That's fine, but by default (both 5.5 and 4.8) they include
things like postgres libs, dovecot IMAP, their apache, X11 etc. I then
have to spend time removing crap I don't need that eats up disk space
and causes library conflicts with $WORK's software. Although disk is
cheap, I want a smaller footprint so VMs will upload quickly to
headquarters over my limited upstream and fit on smaller thumb drives
for training classes, etc. With CentOS if I use yum to remove
"postgres-libs" which conflicts with $WORK's own postgres the system
becomes unusable, because it removes system-config stuff!

The *option* of installing $KITCHEN_SINK is nice, because you know it
is pre-rolled and all the dependencies are there, but for the tasks I
do, it isn't the best deal.