On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 08:49:38AM -0600, Florin Iucha wrote:
> What is this consistency and coherence that you are talking about?
> The fact that all the user-space apps included on the CD run properly
> with the kernel and libc included on the CD?

Alright, let me give this a shot.  

I think what Josh and Steve are getting at, is FreeBSD's concept of a
base system.

FreeBSD has a *very* strict file hierarchy (man hier in freebsd or see
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.3-RELEASE&format=html).
What this means is that there is strict separation between the core
operating system and third party packages.  The core OS includes the
kernel, but also a couple of editors (vi and ee), a couple of shells
(tcsh, csh, sh), core libs, bind 9, and a few other things.  The nice
thing about that is that those things are guaranteed by the FreeBSD team
and you never have to worry about the most basic parts of your OS being
damaged by a package upgrade, for instance.  

I remember a few years ago watching dselect in debian remove the entire
OS, including the kernel and dselect itself.  While it was a PEBKAC/user
error - that can never happen in FreeBSD (using package tools).  In
fact, you can mount the base part of freebsd read-only, to really
prevent such occurrences. 

One nice thing about all of this from my (the admin's) perspective, is
that FreeBSD's base config files live in /etc, and ALL third party
configurations live in /usr/local/etc.  In fact, all third party
ports/packages get installed to /usr/local.  No matter how badly you
hose up your box, it is safe to rm -rf /usr/local/ and (and /var/db/pkg
and maybe one or two other spots) and start over.  

Now, I am not trying to troll tclug here; just trying to clarify a core
difference between FreeBSD and linux.

Dan