Re: RFC: Renaming "FreeBSD" repo in /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf to "FreeBSD-ports"

> On Aug 20, 2025, at 5:33 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> Miroslav Lachman <000.fbsd@quip.cz> writes:
>> If there is one file for each repository, it can be managed using
>> simple tools such as cp / rm / sed to enable, disable or modify
>> repositories - good for scripted setups and automation.
> 
> The correct way to disable one of these repositories is to add
> 
>    repository-name: { enabled: false }
> 
> in a file in /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos.

It’s unclear (to me) whether that’s the *correct* way, or the *recommended* way (pkg(8) calls it “a common idiom”), and in either case *why* is that the recommended/correct way: what breaks if one modifies /etc/FreeBSD.conf ? Why does it break?

It feels very unnatural to me to have one file in /etc specifying a setting (enabled: true”), and another file in /usr/local/etc specifying the opposite.

Also, it seems that whether having “repository-name: { enabled: false}” would actually disable respository-name  would depend on the order of directories in the configuration variable REPOS_DIR. This feels quite brittle.

Thanks,
Matteo