Three cheers for the status quo, enough now? (was: Re: tmux(1) in base)

[Robert Watson]

Dear all:

I think we've now more than adequately demonstrated the importance of not 
e-mailing large mailing lists suggesting changes to the status quo when it 
comes to adding/removing programs from the base without a really compelling 
reason.

The current blend of components is largely historical, modeling the mix found 
in BSD UNIX, and strikes a hard-to-characterize balance between the logical 
extremes "we ship a minimally bootstrapping system" and "we ship every 
application under the sun".  This means for most parts of the base system 
there will be someone who argues it belongs there, and someone who argues that 
it doesn't.

Change proposals along the lines of "Should we add tmux" and "Should we remove 
BIND" are therefore necessarily controversial, and often end up mired in 
exactly this sort of endless and unproductive e-mail discussion.  This is one 
of the most important reasons not to propose them.  The moral is clear, and 
this thread has done nothing to speed the testing, debugging, and release of 
FreeBSD 8.0.

Let's get back to that and maybe let sleeping dogs lie?

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge