Re: None of "man freebsd-base" (or "man pkgbase"), "man pkg-upgrade", or "man pkg-install" deal with documenting .pkgsave and/or .pkgnew behavior or how to handle such

On Monday, June 30, 2026, Larry Fahnoe <fahnoe@fahnoetech.com> wrote:
> On Monday, June 29th, 2026, Mark Millard <marklmi@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> I have suggested elsewhere that the last of the output from those
>> commands should probably list the counts of each of *.pkgnew and
>> *.pkgave such files generated for any where the count is positive.
>> That would make a good prompt to go looking --and allow avoiding
>> looking when none were generated.
> 
> I would second this comment/suggestion, particularly for those who are
> newer or less familiar with FreeBSD update practices. My system admin
> experience comes from other platforms (VMS, linux and other unix) so I
> have been paying attention to the conversations that are mentioning
> the *.pkgnew and *.pkgsave files as they seem a bit less intuitive
> than on the other platforms. For some it may be natural to go looking
> for these leftover telltales but they may represent important but
> neglected potential time-bombs for the less familiar.

OpenVMS and Linux do create these files. OpenVMS increments the version
(;2 or ;3) or drops a TEMPLATE file. Linux uses .dpkg-dist and .dpkg-old
or .rpmnew and .rpmsave. However, it is a not a ticking time bomb, so
they do not tell you and you have not noticed.

Everyone is using roughly the same three-way merge strategy, we just
tell you about the failure case because of our culture which prizes
thorough docs. We do not want to make a big deal out of it because
it is already causing misunderstanding.

Best,
Alex