Re: PKGBASE Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature

On Fri, Aug 8, 2025, at 8:44 AM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 8, 2025 at 11:30 AM DutchDaemon - FreeBSD Forums 
> Administrator <DutchDaemon@freebsd.org> wrote:
>> (trying to see the upside)
>
> As stated earlier in the thread: embedded hardware which wants as 
> minimal a base system as they can get away with. The flip side of the 
> all-encompassing base system is that it's *big*. And grown considerably 
> since the early days, making the early-days management of base a 
> problem now.

I understand where you're coming from. It's also doable today, right? You set the knobs you want in src.conf and make.conf, and you get a smaller base system. I assume this is reasonable for people doing custom embedded hardware systems.

Fine-grained packages makes it more convenient to do this, without having to build base yourself. One question I have is, does this make things more broadly effective?

One of the reasons I came back to FreeBSD is precisely because in Linux container land, I had no idea what the system was running. The OS could be alpine or debian. Someone could have decided that `ps` shouldn't be installed (true story, that was fun to debug). Core utils are installed with busybox, so grep flags match neither GNU nor BSD, and scripts break.

Today, I can say "It's a FreeBSD system, I know this." [1] I immediately know what its base capabilities are, and what its enhanced capabilities are through third-party software. I suppose that will remain true, the only thing being that it will have fewer base capabilities out of the box. Additional capabilities then behave more like third-party software, just provided and tested by the project.

Pat

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng