CFT: FreeBSD Package Base

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Mon, 29 Apr 2019 17:25:54 -0700, Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com> said:

> An anaconda-like installer for freebsd could do that. Also a perfect job for cfengine or ansible. Deploy and use a playbook to enforce policy.

"make delete-old" is inherently interactive.  ("yes | make delete-old"
will delete configuration files that shouldn't be deleted.)  Likewise
etcupdate.

> You don't need to break up base into packages (not arguing against
> packaging) to gain the benefits of configuration management.

Huh?  We have plenty of configuration management already.  What I need
is an automated process for installing updates that doesn't require a
huge pile more sui-generis infrastructure.

> As for updating, freebsd-update is mostly there to accomplish your
> requirement without pkgbase.

Except that it requires a huge pile of infrastructure to build and
distribute updates.  I'd rather have only one, thanks.

> Which begs the question, if we're simply replacing freebsd-update
> and it does most of what we want why the extra effort?

Anyone who isn't using a completely stock make.conf/src.conf is
already replacing freebsd-update, and it would be much *less* effort
to have only one mechanism to distribute software rather than two.

I'd like to have a better installation process, too, because that
would make it much easier to redeploy servers.  But most of our
servers are file servers with unique user data so "redeploy" is not a
relevant operation much of the time.

-GAWollman