At 2:14 PM +1100 1/23/04, Craig Sanders wrote:
e.g. his long-winded page on the "base system", makes it seem as if a base system is something magically distinct that only freebsd has. Linuxdistributions have had "base systems" since the early days and, just like *BSD, "base system" means that it is intended to the "base of a system".
Yeah? Well, two things:1) AFAIK, only Debian has a base system that is truly a minimal install. I suppose some other distros do this now too. But a Red Hat install, for instance, is like the circus coming to town -- hardly a "base."
2) The larger, more important, point was that the userland components of the FreeBSD base are managed under source code control by the FreeBSD developers and aren't "assembled" from many places (tho mostly GNU) as Linux distros do.
That said, both FreeBSD and Debian share much common philosophy. I guess that's why I like and use both!
-- Ward