Re: freebsd-update and pkgbase

On Wed, Aug 06, 2025 at 04:22:09PM -0600, Alan Somers wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 6, 2025 at 3:17 PM Mark Johnston <markj@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > The future of freebsd-update post 15.0 isn't totally clear.  There have
> > been proposals to remove it in 15.0.  IMO we can't remove it outright,
> > since may be needed in order to upgrade 13.x and 14.x jails on a 15.0
> > host.  It is also a shame to lose a simple upgrade utility that is
> > well-documented and that many users are familiar with; compare
> > "freebsd-update upgrade -r 14.3-RELEASE" with the upgrade instructions
> > on the pkgbase wiki page.
> >
> > pkgbase offers a lot of flexibility but I suspect many users don't need
> > it; they need a one-shot "upgrade my system, please" utility that will
> > automatically create a boot environment, configure pkg repositories as
> > needed for major/minor/security upgrades, fetch packages, and handle
> > package installation order (i.e., kernel first, followed by a reboot).
> >
> > I don't really think this functionality belongs in pkg itself.  So,
> > seeing as freebsd-update already handles some of the above, and users
> > are already familiar with it, I propose extending freebsd-update to work
> > in a pkgbase world.  Users would be free to not use it and instead use
> > pkg directly if they so desire, but this would provide a simple
> > alternative to those who don't want or need that flexibility.
> >
> > I'm going to try implementing this, if only to see if there are any
> > unexpected issues that come up.  Feedback would be appreciated, both on
> > the proposal itself and on any technical hurdles you see.  Aside from
> > the internal changes needed to make freebsd-update subcommands use pkg,
> > I see a few tasks and requirements:
> > - freebsd-update should be able to bootstrap pkgbase; in practice, I
> >   think this means that we should import pkgbaseify and make
> >   freebsd-update able to run it if the user so requests.
> > - freebsd-update should possibly live in its own pkgbase package so that
> >   it can upgrade itself before the rest of the system.
> > - freebsd-update should configure a pkgbase repository using a file in
> >   /etc/pkg, disabled by default so that regular "pkg upgrade" doesn't
> >   try to touch the base system.  I'm not sure yet how repository
> >   configurations should be managed: should they be dynamically
> >   generated, or should we provide some bundle of configurations (e.g.,
> >   one for every supported release), or?
> > - We need to figure out how to handle freebsd-update.conf options which
> >   don't make sense in a pkgbase world.
> >
> 
> This sounds like a great idea.  You might consider switching to
> freebsd-rustdate, though.  It's far faster and somewhat easier to use.
> It's probably more maintainable, too.

I'll take a look at it but I don't think we'd want to switch to that and
pkgbase both in 15.0?  Plus, I think a lot of the existing code in
freebsd-update doesn't need to be kept, and I expect using pkgbase
should make freebsd-update much faster in any case...