Forgive me for this post which might sound kind of picky and paranoid, but I really wanted to ask you debian gurus what should actually marked as "base system" package. To me a "base system" package (bsp from now on for brevity's sake) should contain only that strictly necessary stuff to boot up your system, and provide the admin with all the tools he may need from time to time to perform system maintenance. Stuff which should be placed in / then. But I really can't understand why a few files from bsp end up in /usr/sbin, actually I think /usr/sbin is ridicolous in the first place. This just makes the idea behind storing /usr/ on a separate partition pointless: this partition usually gets stressed a lot and it's more likely to fail than, say, your root partition. And should you /usr/ partition fail, some valuable system tools would get trashed with it, leaving you with less tools to repair your damaged system. Don't you think things should be cleared up a little to make for better system consistence? Thanks for making it so far with your reading! ^^ Regards

I'm by no means a Debian guru, but the problem with attempting to define "BSP" packages is with the phrase "....and [would] provide the admin with all the tools he may need from time to time to perform system maintenance."

The difficulty in answering the question is simply that the set of "base packages" would vary depending on what purpose the machine is being used for -- machines that are being used as a firewall, or an Email server, or a database server, or a desktop, etc, etc, will all need a different set of packages installed, and therefore the associated system maintenance tasks would similarly vary. To illustrate, if some sort of important security patch were released for "application X", then installing that patch would be necessary maintenance task for a machine that was using it, but it would not need to be done on a machine where package X was not installed. As a result, there would be no way to universally identify a common set of base packages.

That's just my view of things; as I said, I am most definitely *not* a Debian guru (although I love this distro!) -- J.W.

you made a good point, but I simply can't live with the idea that stuff marked as a "BSP" be placed in /usr/sbin... what should be marked as "BSP" is open to debate, but once something is acknowledged as "BSP" none of its files should end up in the /usr/sbin, because this just makes mouting root (which should just be made out of "BSP's"!) on a dedicated (hopefully read-only) partition totally meaningless: you are leaving out some "core stuff" which happens to lay elsewhere, outside the root *throws in his half cent* *thinks he'd better get back to study*