Clarification on future support for FreeBSD distribution sets
Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:11:50 UTC
Hello, I'd like to ask for clarification on something that appeared in the following release announcement: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/announce/ Specifically: "Support for distribution sets is planned for removal in FreeBSD 16, but will continue (along with freebsd-update support) for the lifetime of the FreeBSD 15 stable branch." If the above refers to deprecating freebsd-update and removing distribution sets from bsdinstall(8) then this sounds reasonable. On the other hand, if the above also refers to removing support for distribution sets from all Makefiles then this is not very good. I think traditionally, all BSD distributions provides simple archive files which could be manually extracted. It is simple and effective and provides a back up method of installing or updating a system when more complex package commands fail to work correctly for some reason. I think it would be extremely useful for FreeBSD project to continue supporting distribution sets via existing Makefile targets. Can someone please confirm that this will continue beyond 15.X releases? Thanks.