On Sun, May 29, 2022 at 09:34:16AM +0200, Frank Kardel wrote: > Hi *! > > I see we are building knobs to not build and install parts of the system. > Somehow I missed the discussion on this. Could someone point me to that > thread, so that I can understand the overall rationale? > > As for NTP: sysinst is configuring for ntp and ntpdate. How is sysinst > supposed to handle a potentially missing NTP installation? > > Frank
Hi, sorry I missed this email, please CC me next time. I talked about this a bit on ICB, but not on the lists yet. My end-game is to make it easier to make minimal embedded images of NetBSD. At work we are shipping an embedded OS derived from FreeBSD, with some patches and custom tools, and also "incredibly stripped down" with many knobs similar to this. It's extremely useful to exclude some non-essential components from the build without modifying the build system. As for why I want to do this to NetBSD, I had the idea of making a small-as-possible live image with GUI similar to Damn Small Linux. This is obviously focused on live and embedded images, so nothing using sysinst. It might be not too intrusive to conditionally enable some options in sysinst, though. There is a secondary goal, to identify groups of commands that are related. When all you have is a big unstructured list of commands, it's difficult to tell that everything configured with MKMROUTING is enabled, or that it's related to the the kernel option MKROUTING. I don't intend to make it possible to remove components of NetBSD that constitute some form of "API", whether that be in shell scripts or otherwise, for compatibility's sake. The exception might be BIND since it's quite large and people have concerns about both the codebase and the license. I also do not intend to make it possible to build NetBSD without any components mandated by POSIX. I hope this answer is satisfactory.
