base

From NetBSD Wiki

NetBSD, as many other older Unixes, doesn't have every part of the system managed by a package manager. When you first install NetBSD, it has a small set of tarballs which provide just enough functionality for it to be considered a complete OS. What is installed from these sets is called the base system.

The idea is that you can install additional software via pkgsrc. Everybody has different needs and expectations of an operating system, so it would be madness to include everything in the base system. There is a certain amount of bootstrapping needed for a system to successfully get pkgsrc working: It needs to have an ftp program to fetch software from the net, it needs to include a kernel to get booted at all, it needs a DHCP client, a tftp client or NFS functionality if it's a diskless machine, a compiler to install packages from source etc. That's why you need some things in advance, without using pkgsrc.

In many Linux distros this works slightly different: there, the base system is also managed by the package system. The line between the two fades away and you can select exactly what you need. It also provides an easy and painless way to update your base system (but also more risk if stuff goes wrong!), because any dependencies automatically get reinstalled as well. There is work underway to bring the same functionality to NetBSD, via syspkg.

NetBSD creates following sets, when building a release from source:

• base.tgz
• comp.tgz
• etc.tgz
• games.tgz
• man.tgz
• misc.tgz
• text.tgz

additionally, if you build with X11 (recommended), there are:

• xbase.tgz
• xcomp.tgz
• xetc.tgz
• xfont.tgz
• xserver.tgz

References

• syspkg notes in the NetBSD source tree.