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

> On Aug 20, 2025, at 6:15 AM, Gleb Popov <arrowd@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 12:48 PM Matteo Riondato <matteo@freebsd.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 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?
> 
> The /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf file comes from base (some pkgbase package
> or as a result of make installworld or something like that). This
> means that system upgrades must handle edits to this file somehow -
> either by overwriting your changes with vanilla version or by merging
> them, which can't be done 100% automatically.

This is true for so many files under /etc, and we have a solution with etcupdate (indeed, not 100% automatically, but widely accepted).

> So encouraging users to not touch system configs but rather write
> add-ons to these configs make upgrades less painful.

It seems to me that we don’t have this encouragement with any other files in /etc.

Why can’t etcupdate handle the changes/updates to FreeBSD.conf? 

>> 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.
> 
> This is also a very common problem which has an established solution
> by prefixing config files with numbers, like
> 10-disable-freebsd-repos.conf

No, REPOS_DIR is about _directories_, not files.

Thanks,
Matteo