There is a very interesting discussion on the FreeBSD Current mailing list about packaging the base system.
The lack of a packaged base system has been a major dislike in FreeBSD since day one for me. I had a couple of false starts into the FreeBSD world as a result of this very fact when I first started playing with it in the 2.5 days.
I was really used to being able to do “rpm -e sendmail” (according to SecurityFocus there has been 28 vulnerabilities in Sendmail since June 1999) on my RedHat machines and the lack of this functionality seemed to be limiting my ability to exercise my personal likes on my OS.
Ofcource as you get used to the concept behind building the world and the eventual introduction of the virtualisation around the mail system these limitations becomes something you can stand, but this is the one aspect that I never liked much in FreeBSD and now finally it seems there may be some hope.
