On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 08:00:09AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote: > Clearly that's not true, or there wouldn't be a user base for the way > FreeBSD does things which led him to have the expectation that this > would be possible.
FreeBSD didn't separate packages from the base system just so a minuscule number of users could "revert to pristine state", because who the hell wants to do that? Almost nobody. The ability to remove all packages is simply a side effect of the design decision to have a small, centrally controlled, self-consistent base system. Everything else is a "package" -- an add-on that is not part of the base system, and may not have the same level of quality control and integration that the base system has. Debian doesn't work this way. The entire design is different. In Debian, every single thing is a "package",[1] but that doesn't necessarily mean "lower quality optional add-on thing that you can and should chuck into /dev/null at the first opportunity", which is what it means in BSD. Debian has no central "base system". It has only packages -- a package for the C library (libc6), a package for the init system (systemd), a package for the basic scripting shell (dash), and so on. Under BSD, all of these things would be part of the base system, and they would all be maintained by the same people. In Debian, each of them is maintained by a different person, or different group of people. They're not always in sync with each other, they way they are in BSD. There is simply no reasonable way to define what set of packages would constitute a "pristine system" in Debian. The phrase has no meaning. A handful of BSD users wishing that it had meaning doesn't make it so. [1] OK, to be fair, there is a magic tarball that lays out the file system during installation, before any packages can be installed. So, yes, there are a tiny handful of files that magically appear from the void during installation, that are not part of any package. But that's not a "base system" either.
