vital packages

From: Graham Perrin <grahamperrin_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2025 04:48:52 UTC
In addition to packages that already have it:

- which packages might benefit from the vital flag?

An initial shortlist of candidates:

FreeBSD-caroot  (main, not (or not yet) stable/14)
FreeBSD-certctl (stable/14)
FreeBSD-kernel-generic
FreeBSD-kernel-generic-mccam
FreeBSD-kernel-generic-nodebug
FreeBSD-kernel-minimal
FreeBSD-pkgbasify
FreeBSD-pkg-bootstrap
FreeBSD-rescue
FreeBSD-utilities

main branch, unless specified otherwise.


Background
==========

On 11th May 2025, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:

> Le 11 mai 2025 17:29:49 GMT+02:00, Mark Millard <marklmi@yahoo.com> a écrit :
>> In a system/chroot that is based on PkgBase, a "pkg delete -a"
>> that is allowed to run also destroys the system software, not
>> just port packages. There is no way to delete just all the
>> port packages in a PkgBase based system as far as I can tell.
>>
>> …
> no!
>
> there is a vital flag set on some packages that should prevent the bare minimal
> to be removed without -f


<https://github.com/freebsd/pkg/issues/2456> (ykla, July)

<https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-pkgbase/2025-August/000760.html>
– pkgbasify base package requirements

<https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-pkg/2025-August/001419.html>
– pkg bootstrap and chroot

<https://reviews.freebsd.org/D51594#1187612>
– I assume that FreeBSD-pkgbasify will be discrete.

----

grahamperrin@pkg:~ % pkg query -e '%V=1' %n ; pkg -v ; uname -mvKU
FreeBSD-clibs
FreeBSD-runtime
2.2.2
FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE-p2 releng/14.3-n271439-5982521fe3dd GENERIC amd64 
1403000 1403000
grahamperrin@pkg:~ % pkg iinfo uclcmd
uclcmd-0.2.20211204
grahamperrin@pkg:~ %