Overview over "programs" in base

[psypro]

What the best way to get an overview over what packages are in the base.

I want to use base packages, since these have been carefully chosen by the OpenBSD team and get the best security updates.

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by psypro

What the best way to get an overview over what packages are in the base.

We need to clean up a misconception here. There are no packages in the base installation.

• The base installation consists of everything formally defined as "OpenBSD operating system". There are a number of applications which are included, due to compatible licensing, & the willingness of some authors to include their work in what is fundamentally OpenBSD.
• OpenBSD's packages/ports system consists of many (thousands...) of third-party applications which are not part of OpenBSD's base installation due to many reasons -- one, being incompatible licensing.
  
  One site which describes all applications in packages/ports is http://openports.se.
  
  There are a number of applications in packages/ports which are bundled with the official CD set due to compatible licensing. Is this what you seek?

Lastly, if you are really looking for a list of applications found in OpenBSD's base installation, use man(1). For example, to find what editors are in base, issue the following command:

$ man -k editor

[Maxnix]

Originally Posted by psypro

I want to use base packages, since these have been carefully chosen by the OpenBSD team and get the best security updates.

Moreover consider that even ported programs are audited.

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by Maxnix

Moreover consider that even ported programs are audited.

To a much lesser degree than applications are in base. There are simply too few ports developers to provide the same level of scrutiny that is seen in the operating system itself.

The goal of ports developers is to get third-party applications to run on OpenBSD. If bugs are discovered, the best thing ports developers can do is report problems upstream to the original authors of the application, & work with them to make applications better for everyone on all systems, but this is not consistent across the entire ports tree.

Having said this, some ports developers are adding pledge(2) to selected ports which will be helpful, but there are far too many third-party applications for this to be done for all ports in the tree.

[jggimi]

Originally Posted by Maxnix

Moreover consider that even ported programs are audited.

Originally Posted by ocicat

To a much lesser degree than applications are in base....

I'll clarify here. Ports are NOT audited. Yes, it is possible that some ports are written by OpenBSD developers, to OpenBSD clarity standards, but these are not part of the base and there is no audit. If you follow the ports@ mailing list, you will see efforts to remove unmaintained, dead applications from the tree. This is not an audit, this is cruft removal.

---

Case in point: you may have noticed in the 5.9-release announcement that "14 ports now use pledge(2): some decompression tools, mutt, some pdf tools, chromium/iridium, and the i3 window manager. " One of these, I happen to maintain: archivers/p7zip

That application is more than eighty thousand lines of completely undocumented code, with frequent use of specialized pre-processor tokens so that the same modules can be built with different code paths for the various tools in the application suite.

Pledges were applied almost entirely by iterative core dumps and backtrace analyses. Code review was not possible, due to its ... er ... "design".

Even though two developers joined this particular pledge() project with me to lend their expertise, forcing crash dumps was the only way to conduct a code path review. And, during "beta" testing by ports@ users more code paths were discovered that we had not tested, and we were using the application's regression test suite plus additional tests we had devised.

Audit is not a possibility for this application. And this is just one port. The -current tree had 7,651 ports in it as of yesterday, with 8,221 packages, not including $FLAVOR variants.

[psypro]

Thank you for your replay.

So there is no way on the web or inside the os, to know what comes with the "base system"?
I have found out there is a web server with the "base system"
I wonder is there a mysql like database in the "base system"?

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by psypro

So there is no way on the web or inside the os, to know what comes with the "base system"?

Yes, with judicious use of man(1).

I wonder is there a mysql like database in the "base system"?

Have you tried the following?

$ man -k database

In particular, you may be interested in sqlite3(1).

[jggimi]

The entire set of built-in applications can be found in six directories:

/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/X11R6/bin, and /usr/libexec.

There is a SQL relational database system in base: sqlite3(1).

[psypro]

Thank you again, I will try sqlite3

[Maxnix]

Thank you for the clarification, ocicat and jggimi!