[vivin]

Have you read the article? It isn't an ad-hoc distinction. You get the base system with a FreeBSD install. It includes the kernel and everything else that makes it a "FreeBSD system". This is stuff maintained by the BSD team. Everything else is an add-on.

If you blew away /usr/local, you would be left with a pristine (mostly) BSD install.

An analogy is a base windows install and all the associated tools and drivers. Anything else you install on your own is an add-on.

This distinction is hardly arbitrary.

Edit

Seems to me you have a hard time understanding what a "base system" means. This is what the article is trying to explain, and it seems to have gone completely over your head; I can't help with that.

[_qc3o]

I read the article. The distinction is indeed arbitrary. How much do you need for a base system really? Do you need more than the kernel, network drivers, and the filesystem? Last time I checked FreeBSD came with way more than those things. So someone, somewhere decided to include a whole bunch of other things as part of the base whereas they could just as easily be addon packages. I think FreeBSD includes various compilers and perl by default. Why's that? How is a compiler an essential part of a system? There are no apriori reasons to make certain "addons" part of the base system and others not. Linux does not draw this distinction and reaps the benefits of a more coherent system.

The equivalent of "base system" in linux land is called a distribution and rightfully so. There is nothing basic about a distribution. It is an arbitrary set of choices made by the distribution maintainers and it is sold/advertised as such.

[sirn]

I think the easier way to think about the base system is to look at Mac OS X. Stuff in the /usr are installed along with the Mac OS X system, and when people need other packages (or think some packages that shipped as part of the system is too old), they use their favorite package manager to install it to /usr/local or somewhere outside /usr. This is also the case with FreeBSD base system. The package manager do not manage packages that are installed as a part of the system, only the one installed by the user.

As far as the compiler goes, in my 10.3-RELEASE-p5, I can only see clang 3.4.1. No Python, no Perl, no even Bash. If I happen to need clang 3.8, I can just `pkg install clang38` and it will happily live inside /usr/local separate from the one in /usr/bin (that is probably presented for building the world). This one will be managed by pkg, but the one in /usr/bin will be updated when I upgrade to 11.0-RELEASE (which will ship with 3.8).

Thinking in Linux's terms, is probably like installing Debian stable only the minimum, and use pkgsrc to install the rest of the system to /opt.

[_delirium]

You get the base system with a FreeBSD install. It includes the kernel and everything else that makes it a "FreeBSD system". This is stuff maintained by the BSD team. Everything else is an add-on.

This is why I typically find Debian to be a more cohesive system than FreeBSD. If I could run only the base system, or only the base system plus maybe one or two packages, FreeBSD would have a very good story about being developed in a unified, coherent way. But in practice I need a bunch of stuff from ports, and on FreeBSD that much more clearly falls into the "everything else is an add-on" category. There's relatively little integration testing or attempts to make the software in ports do things in a coherent "FreeBSD-style" way; it's a bunch of third-party software delivered mostly as-is. Whereas Debian considers anything in the 'main' Debian repository part of the official release, subject to release-management and integration testing, and ensures it works in a more or less "Debian way". Whether that matters depends on your use case, but for me that makes Debian feel more like a unified system.

I'm thinking mostly about servers here fwiw. On desktop the base/applications distinction works better for me, so I could run "FreeBSD" as a coherent base system and then install some separate applications on top of it, which is all fine. But on servers I prefer the coherent base system to be more "batteries included", including integrated release management of all the major libraries and software packages I'm likely to need. If I deploy on "Debian 8" vs. "FreeBSD 10", for example, the former gives me a much larger set of stable components that work together in a reasonable way, while the latter leaves me to more DIY it outside of the relatively small base system. (Whether this matters of course depends on what you're building.)