Re: (2517) the error message when removing a dependency of a vital package is uninformative (was: Trying to understand base system packages)

On Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:28:18 +0000
Lexi Winter <ivy@freebsd.org> wrote:

> > The base set includes all other sets, why?
> 
> because the base set means "the entire base system", which implies that
> it also installs all other sets.  if you do not want to install "the
> entire base system", you should remove (or not install) the base set.

Hi, can you please confirm if this is a pkg bug, or if I did something
stupid.

# pkg info | grep metapackage

Then for each metapackage I executed:

# pkg delete -f FreeBSD-set-XXX

This removed all sets, including base. The individual packages are
still there. I did not touch them.

If I now attempt to run "pkg autoremove" to see which packages need to
be marked manually installed, pkg goes into infinite loop, gradually
consuming memory at a rate of 1 MiB every 5 seconds.