Re: PKGBASE Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature

> Even better, the "-af" flag simply doesn't touch base. PKGBASE is new. Adding a single flag to pkg that indicates operations are being performed on the base system, or even minimally some warnings (who's going to spot a handful of base pkgs in a list of hundreds when running even an interactive purge of all pkgs?) when the command is run, why are people against simple measures like that? I really fail to see why the people creating this new feature, which I'm sure is useful for some vendor or other funding this stuff, cannot accept that there are actual, real, normal users out there who a) don't care about PKGBASE b) believe POLA adoption in the past is what has made this OS pretty great to use and c) don't see any value in doing a base upgrade and pkg upgrade at the same time (DES mentioned this as a feature, but I have no interest in upgrading two wildly different codebases at the same time and have never wanted to do that).
I think this is an acceptable compromise for now, but I would make one 
change.  It could be a flag, an environment variable, or a the way the 
pkg command is invoked (based on file name if it's hard linked).  When 
invoked as simply 'pkg' it operates as it does now.  We don't see any 
base packages, we can't manage base packages, it's as if they don't 
exist.  If invoked as 'freebsd-setup' (suggestion for name), then we 
only see base packages, we can only manage base packages, etc.

On 8/8/2025 12:09 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
>
>> On Aug 8, 2025, at 11:00 AM, Dimitry Andric <dim@freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 8 Aug 2025, at 15:56, David Chisnall <theraven@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>> On 8 Aug 2025, at 14:42, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>>> Tomek CEDRO <tomek@cedro.info> writes:
>>>>> [...] from user perspective these changes were easy to adapt to :-)
>>>> So will this one.
>>> Let’s remember the thing that started this entire thread: `pkg delete -af`
>>>
>>> This is an *incredibly* stupid thing to do.  Long before pkg came along, I did the equivalent of this and managed to lock myself out of a headless box by doing this because I forgot that I was using the ports version of openssh instead of the base one.
>> I'm one of the people that regularly runs `pkg delete -af`, even with `-y` added. :)  That said, I only use this when I have completely rebuilt a ports collection with poudriere against a newer base jail, and then I'd like to start completely from scratch with freshly installed packages. This also clears out any unnecessary non-leaf packages there were pulled in by a previous package build.
> Yeah, this thread is frustrating because on one hand we have users saying "here's why this is bad" and developers just saying "nobody does that" to someone who is doing that. There's no way to know how many people do that, and there's nothing productive in just saying those people are "using FreeBSD wrong". It's not like the handbook is going to teach you actual systems admin skills to the point where you know the "why's" of what you're doing.
>
> As an analogy, imagine a house. The house is the OS. The furniture is your collection of packages. If I call a mover to empty my house because the furniture no longer fits my needs, has been around too long or something and the mover takes all my furniture out and then plants explosives around the house to make it uninhabitable, that's not great.
>
>> Obviously that is an outlier scenario! But does pkg have a way to express "show me packages only from this particular repo", or "delete only packages from this particular repo"? That would make it easy to do "delete only the packages from ports, not from base".
> Even better, the "-af" flag simply doesn't touch base. PKGBASE is new. Adding a single flag to pkg that indicates operations are being performed on the base system, or even minimally some warnings (who's going to spot a handful of base pkgs in a list of hundreds when running even an interactive purge of all pkgs?) when the command is run, why are people against simple measures like that? I really fail to see why the people creating this new feature, which I'm sure is useful for some vendor or other funding this stuff, cannot accept that there are actual, real, normal users out there who a) don't care about PKGBASE b) believe POLA adoption in the past is what has made this OS pretty great to use and c) don't see any value in doing a base upgrade and pkg upgrade at the same time (DES mentioned this as a feature, but I have no interest in upgrading two wildly different codebases at the same time and have never wanted to do that).
>
> Charles
>
>> -Dimitry
>>
>>
>