Re: About the upcoming changes to pkgbase

> On Oct 10, 2025, at 1:25 PM, Martin <iio7@protonmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Regarding the upcoming change from freebsd-update to pkgbase, I have
> two questions which I haven't been able to find a clear answer to, or
> perhaps I have overlooked something.
> 
> In the documentation[1] it says that pkgbase will replace tarball
> distribution sets, such as base.txz or kernel.txz.
> 
> This almost made me cry because it's so easy to manually download
> those tarballs and upgrade the system manually without using
> freebsd-update.

Those tarballs have saved my butt on more than one occasion, especially when other upgrade methods have broken.  I really do hope that at the very least someone continues to produce a minimal tarball that can be used to reset everything short of /usr/local to a known good state.  I've definitely had actual physical machines out in the field that I couldn't just redeploy from an AWS console.  Fixing my system would go from not just copying one tar file over, but hundreds.

I've made extensive use of mfsbsd (which really needs some love, I've heard whispers it'll be more "official" soon).

With pkgdb, the system is also now at the mercy of a sqlite DB (and the *same* db as your ports-pkgs, if I'm not mistaken) and I've definitely seen db corruption events over the years (less so recently, to be fair).

I do also find it troubling that the command to use pkgbase will be "pkg" and not "pkgbase" or "pkg --base" or whatever.  That you'll effectively be upgrading OS components right alongside ports, using the same commands to upgrade only ports you've been using for a decade or more.  This has been mentioned on several lists, by several people.

Now, this is the way linux has worked for a long time (every discrete OS component is its own package) -- whether it's an RPM based distro or a .deb based one, and I'm sure documentation will emerge as to how to do all the things we need to.  I just hope it all eventually winds up being first-party documentation, and not buried some some wiki page, or some forum post with "try this" and zero replies thereafter.

-Dan