Re: PKGBASE Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature

On  8 Aug, Helge Oldach wrote:
> Brandon Allbery wrote on Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:44:26 +0200 (CEST):
>> 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.
> 
> Traditional tweaking of make.conf works almost as well. We have that
> knob for low-end gear already; I know of several users happy with that
> approach and not seeking a better (?) one.

That works, but pretty much requires that you to do source upgrades.
That is time consuming if you have a bunch of customized VMs to
maintain, and is problematic if the target is small and low peformance.

I recently retired an old single-core i386 machine with only 256 MB of
RAM.  It was still powerful enough for its daily work, but too difficult
maintain.  I have no idea how long it would take for buildworld. I
didn't have another machine running the same OS release, and its network
connectivity wasn't suitable for NFS mounting /usr/obj. What I did was
set up a VM with that release on a host running -CURRENT. tweak src.conf
on the VM to what I desired, and then do "make release". Then I fed the
release artifacts to the scripts that generate the files for binary
updates and uploaded those to a web server.  Then I could run
freebsd-update to update the target machine.  This is not compatible
with applying security fixes in a timely manner.
 
> As long as building from source is still supported, it'll be fine.

That's what I do with my -STABLE and -CURRENT machines.  For machines
running -RELEASE, I would prefer something faster.

> 
> Kind regards
> Helge
>