[geeks] The best things in the world

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2008, Jochen Kunz wrote:

> [FreeBSD]
>> Starting with 5.x they abandoned reason and went on a massive
>> feature bloat just like Linux did with 2.6.
> That bad? Sad. (The last FreeBSD I saw closer was around 4. I used
> 2.2.18 for a long time.)

Reports of FreeBSD's bloat tend to be wildly overstated.  This is from a
fresh "everything" install of FreeBSD 7:

   localhost# df -h
   Filesystem    Size     Used     Avail Capacity   Mounted on
   /dev/ad0s1a   421M     128M      259M    33%     /
   devfs         1.0K     1.0K        0B   100%     /dev
   /dev/ad0s1e   383M      12K      353M     0%     /tmp
   /dev/ad0s1f   5.9G     1.5G      4.0G    27%     /usr
   /dev/ad0s1d   726M     8.6M      659M     1%     /var

In /usr, 385M of that is the ports tree, 237M of that is stuff from the
ports tree needed solely to support Xorg 7 and all its wonderful bloat,
476M of that is the source tree, and 240M of that is the multilingual
documentation (not the man pages).  Without X11, ports, and the
translations of the documentation, it'll easily fit on a 1G disk.

A lot of the other growth just can't be helped.  GCC 4.2.1 is a massive
piece of software (it plus its dependencies are over a quarter of the
source tree).  This is why the OpenBSD project is in the process of a
switch to the Portable C Compiler.

To equate it with what happened in Linux 2.6 is rather unfair, though.
There's no in-kernel http daemon (or anything remotely close to that level
of silliness), for example.  The dynamic /dev actually works, as opposed
to being maintained by some userland daemon.  There's very little fluff in
the kernel or base OS at all, really.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |