[illumos-Developer] ejecting the archivers from illumos-gate

[Paul Armstrong]

At 2010-11-29T10:32-0800, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> I would hereby like to propose that we remove tar, pax, cpio, and even
> rmt (which exists to support tar), from the illumos-gate consolidation.

OK. So this makes some sense, but how about we step back and consider
the larger picture.

Which goal is Illumos heading for?
* To be like Linux where only the kernel is supplied and the rest is up
  to the distributions.
* To be like BSD where a complete and useful operating system is shipped
  as the default and you get to add your own stuff as you like through
  packaging (and maybe a little PATH manipulation). There's nothing
  stopping a distribution from taking the base and changing the package
  list to install star by default instead of the tar shipped by Illumos.

Picking one philosophy and holding to it seems like a better approach
than picking one and then cutting gaping holes in it when we have heavy
contention. Treading the line between these two philosophies where only
a semi-useful OS is shipped by default seems like the worst of both
worlds. We get all the headaches of dealing with non-critical stuff and
all the crap involved with having to build a WOS rather than just
shipping a full OS in the first place.

If the goal is to head for the former, rather than just pulling tar et
al out, how about going through and purging everything that's not
absolutely necessary? Then any future arguments are over critical
things.

Paul