Re: [HEADS UP] stable/15: new base packages for PAM, zstd

Anton Shterenlikht wrote in <aeh6ddAuDClL4YFn@cmplx.uk>:
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 12:52:43PM -0700, Mark Millard wrote:
> > On 4/21/26 08:52, Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
> > > On Tue, Apr 07, 2026 at 12:30:50PM +0100, Lexi Winter wrote:
> > > I recently upgraded Lenovo T480 laptop from some 14.x relase to 15.0-RELEASE-p4.
> > > I'm still figuring out the use of pkg for base upgrades.
> > > 
> > > For a few weeks all was working more or less well (some unexpected
> > > reboots, but I had no time to dig into that).
> > > 
> > > After reading your mail, I typed the pkg query command you suggested,
> > > which returned nothing.
> > > I then did "pkg install FreeBSD-set-minimal".
> > > When that completed, I realised that my user is gone....
> > > 
> > > Looking at /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd I see that indeed
> > > my user is not there anymore.
> > 
> > Did you end up with the likes of:
> > 
> > /etc/passwd.pkgsave
> > /etc/master.passwd.pkgsave
> 
> Yes, I have /etc/master.passwd.pkgsave
> 
> So what happened?
> Is it expected that "pkg install FreeBSD-set-minimal"
> should erase all ordinary users from /etc/master.passwd
> and save the original file as /etc/master.passwd.pkgsave?
 
no, something has gone wrong here.

how did you install this system?

/etc/master.passwd is in the FreeBSD-runtime package, which must always
be installed on a pkgbase system.  the only reason 'pkg upgrade' would
overwrite it with a pristine copy is if you somehow didn't have that
package installed, but if that was the case, the system would already
be completely non-functional.

the only way i can imagine this happening if you had a non-pkgbase
system, then installed FreeBSD-runtime (e.g., as a dependency of
FreeBSD-set-minimal), but this should not be possible in a normal
non-pkgbase installation since the FreeBSD-base repository won't
be enabled.