Seriously – dd is required by the standard boot procedure
We read above: standard. I am not a developer as olli@, but I have made some non-standard
installations that would have been much more difficult not having standard tools, in which it would
have been a dream to be able to just type
pkg add xxx
. I think it was an error to remove
slattach
,
although a lot of people would say it was obsolete, insecure, primitive, etc.
And in the same fashion as a Usenix conference without Kirk and Eric is not a Usenix conference, a BSD without UFS and Sendmail is not BSD.
And UFS is a good filesystem and sendmail not worse than other MTAs. And sure, sendmail is used out
of custom, perhaps only because it is there as default, but this is not a problem, it is an advantage: one
puts energy to learn an MTA and then it is easy to use and configure. One puts energy to learn a
standard FreeBSD. FreeBSD becomes then a concept of a full OS, not of a pkg-supermarket with products
for every taste. Learning, the beginning, needs always some energy. Those that want other MTA may install it.
Those that are creative and really want to do something better, should write an new OS and leave FreeBSD
as FreeBSD. Then we have more, not less. The Unix creators did that with plan9, and plan9 is a wonderful
OS, conceptually better than Unix.