Why not remove old stuff.

I personally consider freebsd containing old stuff like ed , like sendmail, or like csh.
Why not remove them or move them to optional ports. We live in the year 2019 after all ?
 
The idea of FreeBSD is to be a self-contained and complete operating system, IOW, without installing any ports, it should be fully functional, and this is a good thing.

This definitely includes an editor and a shell providing some more features than plain /bin/sh. I'm personally not so sure about an MTA. And of course, you can always have an argument over which editor/shell/... you bundle. I'm not a fan of C shells either.

But then, FreeBSD is highly configurable as well. In my own build, I disable tcsh, sendmail and a bunch of other things. In the future, with "packaged base", you'll be able to leave out components without building yourself. Anyways, you'll never see a FreeBSD base release that needs any port to do any administrative or recovery task, and again, this is a good thing. It's one of the things making FreeBSD more valuable for me over e.g. a typical Linux distribution.
 
I personally consider freebsd containing old stuff like ed , like sendmail, or like csh.
Why not remove them or move them to optional ports. We live in the year 2019 after all ?

It seems that we have a post here coming from years of Linux usage from OP. Linux is a sort of slow OS, with systemd it makes it untrusted, it performs very slowly compared to BSD, if you don't recompile Linux kernel yourself and exclude all stuffs in kernel.

The best BSD ever is in my pers. opinion: NetBsd. It works, fast, and stable, several years of uptime is possible.

csh or sh ? versus bash ? would you ever mean this?
csh, ed, vi or vim are still widely used.
Unix may maybe use old crap, for a Linux or Windows user point of view. it is okay, our BSD systems perform better and well, and run.
 
Well, FreeBSD is based on the original Berkeley Unix which was based on Bell Labs Unix where development started in the 70's so it's older than Windows by a decade or so. Age isn't the issue. Now If you say 33 years of poor engineering I will second that.

Much as I think FreeBSD is the greatest, I still use Windows, just can't seem to break free of it, much as I'd like to. It ~is~ possible to make Windows private. Using the enterprise version there's a bunch of registry settings you can tweak to shut off all crap you don't want. Though it takes a good amount of effort and gets more involved with every new version. At some point it will become untenable.
 
Linux is a sort of slow OS, with systemd it makes it untrusted, it performs very slowly compared to BSD, if you don't recompile Linux kernel yourself and exclude all stuffs in kernel.

Have to agree with this. I was a Linux user for a long time. It used to be refreshingly fast and efficient speaking from a Debian point of view. It really took a turn for the worse in recent times. My feeling is it came from a lack of organization and direction within the whole GNU community. This is where FreeBSD shines, excellent organization top to bottom and clear direction. That's why it will always be a fast and efficient system.
 
I personally consider freebsd containing old stuff like ed , like sendmail, or like csh.
Why not remove them or move them to optional ports. We live in the year 2019 after all ?
Is this supposed to be a serious post or a troll post? I can't really take it too serious either way though because your idea is kinda absurd. Yes, let's remove the default root shell because... who needs it! :rolleyes:

Anyway, src.conf(5) is something you should look into. Because it'll allow you to fully customize your setup and removing all those "old so surely obsolete" software. Just a fair heads up: don't expect your OS to run properly afterwards :p

Just because something is old doesn't make it obsolete. That's one of the most dumbest arguments I've heard in a while. Look into games/nethack36 sometime; that game has lasted for over 6 years without any updates and amazingly enough (not so much) people even played it too!
 
Have to agree with this. I was a Linux user for a long time. It used to be refreshingly fast and efficient speaking from a Debian point of view. It really took a turn for the worse in recent times. My feeling is it came from a lack of organization and direction within the whole GNU community. This is where FreeBSD shines, excellent organization top to bottom and clear direction. That's why it will always be a fast and efficient system.

The more developers coming from Linux, the less chances that BSD will survive like it is today. It will endanger the BSD systems, seriously.
Law of physics.

BSD is even taking about wayland.

Too-many-cooks-spoil-the-broth.

too-many-cooks-spoil-the-broth-clipart.gif
 
When something is old, it works.
You can say that again. I use DOS every day - albeit a highly individualized setup such as most people have never seen. For all text, which I love, it just rocks. Of course I use FreeBSD because of the necessity for modern protocols, but it is my choice precisely because it is old - which means mature. Sure there is stuff there which is beyond my interest, indeed understanding, but others think differently - and so they should.
 
I personally consider freebsd containing old stuff like ed , like sendmail, or like csh.
Why not remove them or move them to optional ports. We live in the year 2019 after all ?

look, before FreeBSD i was using OpenBSD, there they change stuff more easily. For example the shell is (zsh, no, my mistake, i correct) ksh.

FreeBSD is more conservative, it tries not to astonish you. This is a strength you will appreciate in the long run.

About 'ed', you may need it, in extreme cases. it is just a matter of time.
 
You can say that again. I use DOS every day - albeit a highly individualized setup such as most people have never seen. For all text, which I love, it just rocks. Of course I use FreeBSD because of the necessity for modern protocols, but it is my choice precisely because it is old - which means mature. Sure there is stuff there which is beyond my interest, indeed understanding, but others think differently - and so they should.

OJ, special message destination:
I think that it is better to use the console of freebsd, since it has a keyboard settings into the rc.conf and large fonts
Code:
keymap=fr
ntpd_enable="YES"
ntpd_sync_on_start="YES"
sshd_enable="YES"
fusefs_enable="YES"
#apache24_enable="YES"
allscreens_flags="-f terminus-b32"
The cool thing for reading, older eyes, is that the console does show nice large chars, and you can add utf-8 on .shrc, for good fonts.
With screen you can readily have 3 monitors, with all of them targeting the screen session over ssh (one pc having the screen). To read on the left, F11 or F12, to read on the right ... anyway you'd like.
Code:
bindkey -k F1 prev
bindkey -k F2 next
vbell off
Since you have ncurses or term for compiling with clang by default, you could eventually try to move from DOS to Unix. With ncurses, it is easy that the same software works 20-30 years, like ed, vi, vim,... Which applications of DOS do you need?
 
I personally consider freebsd containing old stuff like ed , like sendmail, or like csh.
Why not remove them or move them to optional ports. We live in the year 2019 after all ?
Instead of going all philosophical and off-topic, why don't we think through the questions here?
  • ed: I doubt that very many people still use it as their first-line desktop editor. But it is still used in many scripts, and people rely on it being available for scripting. As far as I know, Linux ships it too (I just checked two different Linux distributions, and it is there). Removing it from the base install would be silly and damaging.
    Don't like using it for a desktop editor? There are zillions of other choices, led by vim and emacs. Easy to install from packages if you want them. vi is installed as part of the base system; many people like to use vim instead (others don't).
  • sendmail: You need an MTA (mail transfer agent) in the base system, otherwise even things like cron stop working. Sendmail definitely is an excellent MTA, and it is extremely powerful. If also has a very long tradition in the BSD world, going back many decades. There is lots of knowledge around about how to configure it. On the other hand, with extreme power comes great difficulty in configuring it optimally. I do wonder whether sendmail is the ideal MTA for small simple systems, in particular non-server desktop systems; sendmail configuration is probably the hardest thing amateur sys admins will ever encounter. Some OS distributions ship other MTAs by default. I can see the arguments pro and con, and have no particularly strong opinion on which should be the default. If the OP strongly things another MTA should be shipped by default, he could make that argument, here or on the mailing lists.
  • csh: is a perfectly fine and simple shell; the version that ships in FreeBSD actually happens to be tcsh, which is actually a very good desktop login shell. The FreeBSD base also ships with sh, another fine and simple shell. Both C-style and Korn-style shells have long traditions. Whether one should use one or the other for normal logins is a religious question. FreeBSD puts the root account on csh; Linux distributions have traditionally used sh (in the form of bash) instead.
    Again, removing (t)csh from the base install would be insane and damaging, too large a fraction of all users want to use it. Replacing it as the default root shell with something else is worth debating, but I remember that this debate has been had several times, and so far no argument in favor of switching has survived.
    OpenBSD is a different situation, with a different mindset. Their answers are interesting and informative, but not conclusive for this OS.
 
OJ, special message destination:
I think that it is better to use the console of freebsd, since it has a keyboard settings into the rc.conf and large fonts
Thanks for that. :) Great stuff.
The thing about DOS is the utilities available. Microsoft wrote very little of value for that OS, it was all third party. I don't think we'll ever get such a high level of development for text only as happened in that era. Those days are gone. For skeptics, I would note that all the usual UNIX utilities and functions such as command completion are there. It's basically a dumbed down version of *nix with a huge library of small and easy to use utilities. The big value (as it applies to this thread) is that it is 100% stable - meaning no updates.
 
Thanks for that. :) Great stuff.
The thing about DOS is the utilities available. Microsoft wrote very little of value for that OS, it was all third party. I don't think we'll ever get such a high level of development for text only as happened in that era. Those days are gone. For skeptics, I would note that all the usual UNIX utilities and functions such as command completion are there. It's basically a dumbed down version of *nix with a huge library of small and easy to use utilities. The big value (as it applies to this thread) is that it is 100% stable - meaning no updates.

Well DOS was interesting breakthrough at that time.
iii-6f407026d0760b5183f111480f817f0c-Framework%20III%20-%20Graph.png


Graphical means maintenance and rewrite *all the time*.

I actually converted my DOS code, from pascal to C many years ago. I firstly used the ncurses library and then I removed ncurses so that it works on any platforms. It is about 30 years now old software stuffs, that still work. There is no maintenance needed, because it works.

For instance, abook, it is old and ugly text but it is still there.
 
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